A simulated annealing heuristic for a branch and price-based routing and spectrum allocation algorithm in elastic optical networks

Abstract

In the paper we focus on developing an efficient algorithm capable of producing optimal solutions to the problem of routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) – a basic optimization problem in elastic optical networks. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer program and we solve it using a branch and price (BP) algorithm.With the aim to improve the performance of BP, we enhance it with a simulated annealing-based RSA heuristic that is employed in the search for upper bound solutions. The results of numerial experiments show that the heuristic allows to decrease significantly the time required to solve the problem.