Heuristic approach to the passive optical network with fibre duct sharing planning problem

Similar to the constrained facility location problem, the passive optical network (PON) planning problem necessitates the search for a subset of deployed facilities (splitters) and their allocated demand points (optical network units) to minimise the overall deployment cost. A mixed integer linear programming formulation stemming from network flow optimisation is used to construct a heuristic based on limiting the total number of interconnecting paths when implementing fibre duct sharing. A disintegration heuristic is proposed based on the output of a centroid, density-based and a hybrid clustering algorithm to reduce the time complexity while ensuring close to optimal results. The proposed heuristics are then evaluated using a large real-world dataset, showing favourable performance.