Comparison of heuristic methods for the design of edge disjoint circuits

In this paper heuristics are studied for the design of edge disjoint circuits. We formulate the Edge Disjoint Circuits Problem (EDCP) in the context of a telecommunication network design problem: the roll-out of Fibre to the Cabinet. This problem setting can be represented by a graph. A small subset of the vertices are cabinets and one vertex is the central office. The objective is to minimise the sum of the circuit costs to connect all street cabinets to the central office, while satisfying capacity restrictions and edge disjointness within each circuit. In the studied graphs inexpensive paths are present with available ducts, which complicate the analysis considerably. The problem is NP-hard, so an insertion heuristic is developed. After the construction of an initial solution, local search is used to improve the solution. Finally, the performance of the insertion heuristic is compared to a cluster first-route second heuristic. The insertion heuristic clearly shows better performance for almost all types of instances that were studied while taking just a bit more time.