Due to the success of the Internet and the diversity of communication applications, it is becoming increasingly difficult to forecast traffic patterns. To capture the traffic variations, we introduce a flexible model where traffic belongs to a polytope. We assume that the traffic demands between nodes can be carried on many paths, with respect to network resources. Moreover, to guarantee the network stability and to make the routing easy to implement, the proportions of traffic flowing through each path have to be independent of the current traffic demands. We show that a minimum-cost routing satisfying the previous properties can be efficiently computed by column and constraint generations. We then present several strategies related to certain algorithmic details. Finally, theoretical and computational studies show that this new flexible model can be much more economical than a classical deterministic model based on a given traffic matrix. This paper can be considered as a mathematical framework for a new flexible virtual private network service offer. It also introduces a new concept: the routing of a polytope.

For the past few decades, combinatorial optimization techniques have been shown to be powerful tools for formulating and solving optimization problems arising from practical situations. In particular, many network design problems have been formulated as combinatorial optimization problems. With the advances of optical technologies and the explosive growth of the Internet, telecommunication networks have seen an important evolution and therefore designing survivable networks has become a major objective for telecommunication operators. Over the past years, much research has been carried out to devise efficient methods for survivable network models, and particularly cutting plane based algorithms. In this paper, we attempt to survey some of these models and the optimization methods used for solving them.