Effective network recovery with higher priority to service recovery after a large-scale failure

When an unexpected large-scale communication network disruption occurs, the damaged network will be recovered gradually and the recovery process involves multiple recovery stages. The present paper proposes a network recovery method that can determine an appropriate recovery order of damaged network components over multiple recovery stages considering both prompt network service recovery and fair traffic recovery to meet traffic demand. In particular, network service recovery is assigned a higher priority. The optimal recovery order problem is formulated by mixed integer linear programming (MILP), and the problem-decomposition method is also introduced for application in instances when it is difficult to solve the problem of large-scale failures within a practical computation time. The effectiveness of the proposed method was numerically evaluated. The results indicate that we can determine a more appropriate recovery order in terms of both network service recovery and traffic recovery as compared with a benchmark method, and that the computation time is drastically reduced by using the problem-decomposition method.