A New Automatic Tool for Submarine Cable Path Planning and System Design

Submarine optical fiber cables are vital for global communications. Traditional manual planning methods are labor-intensive. We develop an automatic cable path planning and system design tool that provides optimal solutions based on rigorous methodology and algorithms. Our approach introduces a penalty function that accounts for harmful human activities and potential natural disasters, employs a realistic model of surface topography as a triangulated manifold, and uses the Fast Marching Method for efficient path planning. Although our current results are optimal given the available data, they could improve with additional data. Our poster describes our methodology and demonstrates real-world optimal cable system designs obtained by our tool interface.