Genetic algorithm based model for capacitated network design problem

Efficient design of networks topologies is challenging, especially with the arrival of the virtualization in these last years. In this paper, we deal with the Capacitated Network Design Problem (CNDP) with modular link capacities to design minimum cost network while satisfying the flow demands. We propose a two levels Genetic Algorithm (GA) based model that can deal with several variations of CNDP. Our proposition defines a new encoding scheme to treat the modular case. Extensive simulation results on Atlanta, France and Germany network instances show that the proposed algorithm is much more efficient than the Iterative Local Search algorithm.