Decision support system for planning telecommunication networks: a case study applied to the Andalusian region
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Decision support system for planning telecommunication networks: a case study applied to the Andalusian region P Cortes*, L Onieva, J LarranÄeta and JM Garcia University of Seville, Seville, Spain Network planning is essential to design real broadband integrated services digital networks (B-ISDN). This paper presents an operations research application to the design of an optic ®bre network for the Andalusian region. The economical appraisal is the main consideration in order to take the appropriate decisions: hub location, region sizes and selection of the urban nodes that will receive telecommunication contents. A decision support system with a graphic interface that allows interactive analysis of different scenarios is presented. The system contains a set of mathematical programming models and it has the capability to dynamically construct and solve instances of those models. In addition, it provides data preparation and reports. The system is an integrated, user-friendly and powerful tool to make planning studies by ®rms developing cable network systems in the telecommunications market. Keywords: digital networks; decision support system; case study; optimization
Introduction This paper presents a decision support system (DSS), developed as integrated, user-friendly and powerful software that can help the designer in the telecommunication network planning process. Sprague and Carlson1 de®ned DSS as interactive computer-based systems that help decision-makers utilize data and models to solve unstructured problems. Wynne2 shows how DSS must help operations research (OR) acting as supportive tools under the management user's control, which do not attempt to automate the entire process, prede®ning objectives or imposing solutions. Following these lines our tool lets the user include in the decision process more information than is usually allowed with other approaches, providing data preparation and reports, as well as the ability to deal with less structured situations and the ¯exibility to evaluate alternative scenarios. The use of DSS constitutes an important tool for ®rms developing network communication systems in the telecommunication market. In this same line, Cosares et al3 proposed a DSS for designing interconnected SONET (the US transmission standard) rings. More recently and related to this research, Medova4 has presented a visualization tool for B-ISDN backbone planning. Our DSS has been applied in the optic ®bre telecommunication network planning for the Andalusian region (the *Correspondence: P Cortes, Escuela Superior de Ingenieros, Camino de los Descubrimientos, s=n, Isla de la Cartuja, 41092 Sevilla, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]
southern-most region of Spain). The Andalusian Regional Government divided this geographical area into four of®cial demarcations after the technical5 study made by the Engineering School of Seville. The application we will describe in this paper can be used for each of th
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