Strategic network restoration

For any networked infrastructure, damage to arcs and/or nodes and associated disruption of network services is inevitable. To reestablish service in a damaged network, affected components must be repaired or reconfigured, a process that can be time consuming and costly, so care must be taken to identify network restoration strategies that reestablish service most efficiently. A strategic goal of service restoration, therefore, is to ensure that facility restoration is prioritized so that system performance is maximized over a planning horizon within budgetary restrictions. To address this problem, this paper proposes a multi-objective optimization approach for network restoration during disaster recovery. The proposed model permits tradeoffs between two objectives, minimization of system cost and maximization of system flow, to be evaluated. A telecommunication application illustrates the significance of the developed approach.