Solving General Ring Network Design Problems by Meta-Heuristics

Ring network design problems have many important applications, especially in the field of telecommunications and vehicle routing. Those problems generally consist of constructing a ring network by selecting a node subset and corresponding direct links. Different requirements and objectives lead to various specific types of NP-hard ring network design problems reported in the literature, each with its own algorithms. We exploit the similarities in problems to produce a more general problem formulation and associated solution methods that apply to a broad range of problems. Computational results are reported for an implementation using a meta-heuristics framework with generic components for heuristic search.