TY - GEN A1 - D'Andreagiovanni, Fabio A1 - Gleixner, Ambros T1 - Towards an accurate solution of wireless network design problems N2 - The optimal design of wireless networks has been widely studied in the literature and many optimization models have been proposed over the years. However, most models directly include the signal-to-interference ratios representing service coverage conditions. This leads to mixed-integer linear programs with constraint matrices containing tiny coefficients that vary widely in their order of magnitude. These formulations are known to be challenging even for state-of-the-art solvers: the standard numerical precision supported by these solvers is usually not sufficient to reliably guarantee feasible solutions. Service coverage errors are thus commonly present. Though these numerical issues are known and become evident even for small-sized instances, just a very limited number of papers has tried to tackle them, by mainly investigating alternative non-compact formulations in which the sources of numerical instabilities are eliminated. In this work, we explore a new approach by investigating how recent advances in exact solution algorithms for linear and mixed-integer programs over the rational numbers can be applied to analyze and tackle the numerical difficulties arising in wireless network design models. T3 - ZIB-Report - 16-12 Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-59010 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - D'Andreagiovanni, Fabio A1 - Mett, Fabian A1 - Nardin, Antonella A1 - Pulaj, Jonad T1 - Integrating LP-guided variable fixing with MIP heuristics in the robust design of hybrid wired-wireless FTTx access networks JF - Applied Soft Computing N2 - This study investigates how to model and solve the problem of optimally designing FTTx telecommunications access networks integrating wired and wireless technologies, while taking into account the uncertainty of wireless signal propagation. We propose an original robust optimization model for the related robust 3-architecture Connected Facility Location problem, which includes additional variables and constraints to model wireless signal coverage represented through signal-to-interference ratios. Since the resulting robust problem can prove very challenging even for a modern state-of-the art optimization solver, we propose to solve it by an original primal heuristic that combines a probabilistic variable fixing procedure, guided by peculiar Linear Programming relaxations, with a Mixed Integer Programming heuristic, based on an exact very large neighborhood search. A numerical study carried out on a set of realistic instances show that our heuristic can find solutions of much higher quality than a state-of-the-art solver. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2017.07.018 VL - 61 SP - 1074 EP - 1087 ER -