Heuristic approaches to design of communication networks: Variable neighborhood search, particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization

Topological optimization of minimum cost telecommunication networks subject to reliability constraint is an NP-hard problem. In literature there are diffrent metaheuristics to solve this problem. In this study, new algorithms based on variable neighborhood descent, particle swarm optimization and ant colony optimization have been developed to solve the topological optimization of communication networks under reliability constraint. When new algorithms are compared in terms of solution quality and computation burden it is seen that the algorithm based particle swarm optimization outperforms other algorithms.