Going the Extra Mile with Disaster-Aware Network Augmentation

Abstract

Network outages have significant economic and societal costs. While network operators have become adept at managing smaller failures, this is not the case for larger, regional failures such as natural disasters. Although it is not possible, and certainly not economic, to prevent all potential disaster damage and impact, we can reduce their impact by adding cost-efficient, geographically redundant, cable connections to the network.In this paper, we provide algorithms for finding cost-efficient, disaster-aware cable routes based on empirical hazard data. In contrast to previous work, our approach finds disaster-aware routes by considering the impact of a large set of input disasters on the network as a whole, as well as on the individual cable. For this, we propose the Disaster-Aware Network Augmentation Problem of finding a new cable connection that minimizes a function of disaster impact and cable cost. We prove that this problem is NP-hard and give an exact algorithm, as well as a heuristic, for solving it. Our algorithms are applicable to both planar and geographical coordinates. Using actual seismic hazard data, we demonstrate that by applying our algorithms, network operators can cost-efficiently raise the resilience of their network and future cable connections.

The complexity landscape of disaster‐aware network extension problems

“…Note that the study did not consider planning several paths simultaneously. 3 The dashed (blue) line segments illustrate the construction of a new edge in the cost-efficient model of [22]. The edge is along a predefined grid, where it can take a vertical, horizontal, or diagonal line segment.…”

“…The study [22] assumes that a disaster destroys some points in the plane. If a link or node intersects with any of these disaster points, it is destroyed.…”

“…In the disaster model of [22], it is challenging to define whether a new cable is affected by a disaster if it can take any arbitrary route. To mitigate this problem, [22] limits the route of the cable to traverse along a 2D grid.…”

“…In the disaster model of [22], it is challenging to define whether a new cable is affected by a disaster if it can take any arbitrary route. To mitigate this problem, [22] limits the route of the cable to traverse along a 2D grid. More precisely, the cable should traverse the points of a predefined grid, where it can take a vertical, horizontal, or diagonal line segment, see the dashed (blue) link on Figure 3 as an example.…”

“…We would like to highlight that this article is an extended and thoroughly revised version of our conference paper [28]. In the original study, we put more emphasis on comparing the results of two recent papers [22,25] and investigating the complexities of the problems tackled by them. The current paper has a larger scope, summarizing and charting the complexity results of related prior works (see Tables 1 and 2).…”