Simple heuristic methods for network routeing: A case study

This paper describes the development of simple heuristic methods for fast routeing of transmissions in a telecommunications network with links of limited capacity. It shows how the problems may be structured into a four-level hierarchy of subproblems, and considers heuristic approaches for solving these subproblems. At the lowest level, it introduces a method for plotting a route between two nodes based on information derived from a multidimensional scaling projection of the network. The paper concludes by describing how the methods considered were combined to provide a solution to the routeing problem that was implemented as a decision support system for both real-time routeing and assistance with network configuration design.