Optimization Issues in Telecommunications The complexity and size of modern telecommunications networks provide us with many challenges and opportunities. In this book, the challenges that we focus on are those which involve optimization. This simply refers to scenarios in which we are aiming to find something approaching the ‘best’ among many possible candidate solutions to a problem. For example, there are an intractably large number of ways to design the topology of a private data network for a large corporation | Telecommunications Optimization Heuristic and Adaptive Techniques. Edited by David W. Corne Martin J. Oates George D. Smith Copyright 2000 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBNs 0-471-98855-3 Hardback 0-470-84163X Electronic 1 Heuristic and Adaptive Computation Techniques in Telecommunications an Introduction David Corne Martin Oates and George Smith Optimization Issues in Telecommunications The complexity and size of modern telecommunications networks provide us with many challenges and opportunities. In this book the challenges that we focus on are those which involve optimization. This simply refers to scenarios in which we are aiming to find something approaching the best among many possible candidate solutions to a problem. For example there are an intractably large number of ways to design the topology of a private data network for a large corporation. How can we find a particularly good design among all of these possibilities Alternatively we may be trying to find a good way to assign frequency channels to the many users of a mobile network. There are a host of complex constraints involved here but it still remains that the number of possible candidate solutions which meet the main constraints is still too large for us to hope to examine each of them in turn. So again we need some way of finding good solutions among all of these possibilities. These challenges present opportunities for collaboration between telecommunications engineers researchers and developers in the computer science and artificial intelligence Telecommunications Optimization Heuristic and Adaptive Techniques edited by . Corne . Oates and . Smith 2000 John Wiley Sons Ltd 2 Telecommunications Optimization Heuristic and Adaptive Techniques communities. In particular there is a suite of emerging software technologies specifically aimed at optimization problems which are currently under-used in industry but with great potential for profitable and effective solutions to many problems in .
