A constraint directed approach for communication network design/planning

A constraint-directed reasoning architecture is described that produces satisfactory solutions without global backtracking for the problem of rapidly configuring a transportable communications network. This problem requires that equipment be placed so that subscribers connected either by telephone line or radio can communicate with other network subscribers. It is shown that this is a difficult problem for operations research approaches and the system architecture and the heuristics that constrain the search are described. Another significant contribution of this work is that the authors replaced a slow state space generator operation for calculating radio signal reception with heuristics. It is shown how the traditional statistical calculations are inappropriate for network configuration problems and the set of heuristics substituted are described. A timing comparison made between the Longley-Rice signal propagation algorithm (M.M. Weiner, 1986) and these heuristics shows significant time savings