Enabling extended access aggregation with light-trees and point-to-multipoint coherent transceivers

Currently optical networks are reaching their maximum transport capacity. Different solutions can be used to overcome this capacity limit, but we are going to study, in particular, space division multiplexing (SDM). To use SDM, the reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) need to be adapted to support this multiplexing. In this paper we analyze four switching strategies used in SDM ROADMs and the respective SDM ROADM architectures. These strategies are explained and analyzed, for uncoupled scenarios, in terms of cost and power consumption. The impact of the physical layer impairments (PLIs) amplified spontaneous emission noise, non-linear interference, passband narrowing due to optical filtering and in-band crosstalk is also assessed, considering a cascade of SDM ROADMs with spatial and spatial-wavelength switching granularities. The PLI in-band crosstalk, has insignificant impact, in networks with a single spatial channel or in SDM networks with spatial granularity ROADM architecture, but in a SDM network with spatial wavelength granularity this PLI can lead to an OSNR penalty of around 2 dB, when the number of spatial channels is high. The other PLIs have similar impacts in all networks studied.

Two new continuous-time MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Programming) models are developed for resource constrained project scheduling problems in which activities can be conducted in different (multi) modes. There are efficient and flexible MILP models for this problem in which time is represented by a number of discrete time intervals. However, they require to use large numbers of binary variables as the number of activities increases and time horizon stretches. Hence efforts have been made to formulate MILP models based on continuous-time representation and therefore to speed up the solution process. We propose two novel MILP models based on the event and resource flow concepts. The models are verified by solving benchmark problems in the literature.

MILP and MINLP models for the optimal scheduling of multi-energy systems accounting for delivery temperature of units, topology and non-isothermal mixing

Passive Optical Network (PON) deployments have recently been aiming to combine the capacity of metro and access networks in the last mile of the Internet service provisioning. Deployment of PONs by running fiber to the premises introduces the advantage of huge capacity but at the same time, it calls for a robust design in order to avoid long service outage durations in case of network failures where survivable network design is mostly limited to the deployment budget. In this paper, we propose three mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models for various survivability policies to deploy reliable long-reach PONs under the budget limitations. Each MILP model aims to place the ONUs in optimal locations so that the covered area is maximized while availability requirements of the users are satisfied within the deployment budget. We solve the MILP models under the uniform and heterogeneous availability requirement scenarios and show that service availability and coverage introduce a trade-off so as the coverage and deployment cost do. Two out of the three survivability policies can guarantee 99.99% service availability while the third one is able to guarantee 99.999% by running the proposed MILP models. However, the first two schemes are able to cover larger area when compared to the third scheme which is the most reliable protection policy.

Purpose: The main purpose of the paper is to evaluate the impact of diverse personnel policies around personnel promotion in the design of the strategic staff plan for a public university. The strategic staff planning consists in the determination of the size and composition of the workforce for an organization.Design/methodology/approach: The staff planning is solved using a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model. The MILP model represents the organizational structure of the university, the personnel categories and capacity decisions, the demand requirements, the required service level and budget restrictions. All these aspects are translated into a set of data, as well as the parameters and constraints building up the mathematical model for optimization. The required data for the model is adopted from a Spanish public university.Findings: The development of appropriate policies for personnel promotion can effectively reduce the number of dismissals while proposing a transition towards different preferable workforce structures in the university.Research limitations/implications: The long term staff plan for the university is solved by the MILP model considering a time horizon of 8 years. For this time horizon, the required input data is derived from current data of the university. Different scenarios are proposed considering different temporal trends for input data, such as in demand and admissible promotional ratios for workers.Originality/value: The literature review reports a lack of formalized procedures for staff planning in universities taking into account, at the same time, the regulations on hiring, dismissals, promotions and the workforce heterogeneity, all considered to optimize workforce size and composition addressing not only an economic criteria, but also the required workforce expertise and the quality in the service offered. This paper adopts a formalized procedure developed by the authors in previous works, and exploits it to assess the impact of various personnel policies in the staff planning for a particular university case, and this is the principal contribution of the paper.

Elastic optical network (EON) is a promising candidate for the next generation optical transport network because of its high spectrum efficiency and flexible spectrum allocation. However, to migrate from today’s dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) network to EON, optical nodes such as reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) should be replaced with the ones with expensive flexi-grid wavelength selective switches (WSSs). Thus, whether and how today’s optical network will be evolved to EON is still under debate. Meanwhile, with the technical maturity of optical super-channels that transmit bit rates at the level of 1 Tb/s, super-channels are expected to dominate the future optical transport network because of their attractiveness of high spectrum efficiency and superior cost effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a new quasi-coarse wavelength division multiplexing (Quasi-CWDM) optical network architecture that is compatible to today’s WDM network in spectrum operation, while still maintaining the flexibility of adaptation between the bit rate and the transparent reach of an optical super-channel, but not requiring expensive flexi-grid WSSs. Specifically, the Quasi-CWDM optical network employs large fixed frequency grids, whose spacing falls between the traditional CWDM and DWDM, e.g., 200 GHz or 400 GHz. To maintain the flexibility between the bit rate and the transparent reach of an optical super-channel, different modulation formats are chosen according to channel physical distances. To minimize network hardware cost and maximize carried user traffic demand, we develop a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model and a heuristic algorithm that can efficiently groom upper-layer IP traffic onto the optical layer by optical super-channels. We compare the design based on the Quasi-CWDM network to those based on the DWDM network and the advanced EON. It is found that the proposed Quasi-CWDM network has a much lower hardware cost than the other two types of networks, while achieving spectrum efficiency close to EON.

To support the selection of food items for FFQs in such a way that the amount of information on all relevant nutrients is maximised while the food list is as short as possible. Selection of the most informative food items to be included in FFQs was modelled as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model. The methodology was demonstrated for an FFQ with interest in energy, total protein, total fat, saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, total carbohydrates, mono- and disaccharides, dietary fibre and potassium. The food lists generated by the MILP model have good performance in terms of length, coverage and R 2 (explained variance) of all nutrients. MILP-generated food lists were 32-40 % shorter than a benchmark food list, whereas their quality in terms of R 2 was similar to that of the benchmark. The results suggest that the MILP model makes the selection process faster, more standardised and transparent, and is especially helpful in coping with multiple nutrients. The complexity of the method does not increase with increasing number of nutrients. The generated food lists appear either shorter or provide more information than a food list generated without the MILP model.

Mixed integer linear programming for the design of solar thermal energy systems with short-term storage

A survey on QoT prediction using machine learning in optical networks

Modeling side slopes in vertical alignment resource road construction using convex optimization

An improved MILP model for scheduling crude oil unloading, storage and processing

A new MILP model and fast heuristics for the variable-sized bin packing problem with time windows

Knowledge representation of mathematical optimization problems and constructs for modeling

Impairment aware routing and wavelength assignment algorithms for optical WDM networks and experimental validation of impairment aware automatic light-path switching

Elastic optical networks (EONs) have provision long transmission reach (TR) and high spectral-efficiency (SE). Hence, compared to fixed-grid optical networks, in EONs, managing resources and addressing network design poses complex challenges. In this work, we formulate a link-based mixed integer linear program (MILP) model which considers quality of transmission (QoT) while determining the route, modulation format/level (MF/ML) and spectrum allocation (SA) for every request. To improve SE, model chooses the highest ML; however, when QoT is considered, TR of path with highest ML is very limited. Hence, model finds trade-off between ML, number of required frequency slots (FSs), and TR, with the objective of minimising required amount of network FSs so as to admit all requests. Finally, we evaluate and analyse model's performance and show that for simplicity, existing schemes impractically assume single MF (i.e., higher SE and ML) compared to fixed-grid networks, thereby ignoring the flexible nature of EONs.