Modelling the subscriber network in rural telephone planning - a clustering algorithm

Abstract

The planning telecommunication networks is a problem of great importance, because of the large investments involved as well as due to its impact on the development of economic activities and on society as a whole. The need arises to put flexible computer  decision aid tools at the disposal of decision makers and planning engineers in order to facilitate their tasks and makethe most of their experience, thus turning-the planning process more effective.
The subproblem of determining the secondary distribution network and the subscriber lines is a fundamental stepin the overall rural telephone network planning process. The solution
of the subscriber aggregation subproblem constitutes the basic level of the planning process, laying the foundations for the topological and cable capacity evolution of the primary
distribution network. This paper presents a method for subscriber aggregation which is based on ‘heuristic of advantages”’ which exploits the partition of subscribers into subsets, by minimizing the sum of the internal distances of all subsets.