Martine Labbé (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)

Short Biography

Martine Labbé is Professor of Operations Research at Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her main research area is combinatorial optimization, including graph theory and integer programming problems and with a particular emphasis on location and network design problems. Professor Labbé serves on the editorial board of several journals and has authored and co-authored dozens of scientific papers and book chapters. She has been awarded with the AT&T du Réseau EIDMA award (1998). Professor Martine Labbé is currently president of the European Federation of the Operational Research Societies (EURO).

Lecture to be presented in EWI 2007

Title

Reliable communication network design problems: models and solution methods

Abstract

In recent years the development of telecommunications networks is characterized by the introduction of fiber-optic technology which has resulted in sparse network topologies with large amounts of traffic carried by each links.

Two main issues appear in the planning process of fiber-optic networks: economy and survivability. Economy refers to the construction cost while survivability refers to the restoration of services in the event of node or link failure. Trees satisfy the former goal but not the latter since only one node or link failure makes communication between some parts of the tree impossible. This means that networks are usually required to be at least two-connected.

In this talk, we discuss several reliable network design problems in which the two-connectivity is required and some additional constraints on the length of cycles or paths are also imposed for technological reasons

This is a joint work with Bernard Fortz (Département d’Informatique, Université Libre de Bruxelles).

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