Network design with grooming constraints

Networks are physically and logically decomposed into layers with different technological features. Often, the routing of a demand through a non-multiplexing layer is made by grooming several demands at another, multiplexing-capable layer, thus using less capacity on the former but more on the latter. The problem of designing such a multi-layer network so as to route a set of traffic demands can be solved by embedding multiplexing into a well-suited model. We restrict to a two-layer problem as this is most common in todayʹs network world, then we represent grooming through a model based on paths and semi-paths, and propose a row-column generation approach to solve a set of problems on real-world large networks.