Multiperiod cellular network design via price-influenced simulated annealing (PISA)

Cellular telecommunications systems tend to be more flexible than traditional ones. As a result, traditional approaches to telecommunications network design are often inappropriate for the design of cellular networks, and approaches that explicitly incorporate the increased flexibility into the design process need to be developed. This paper presents one such multiperiod cellular network design problem and solves it via a hybrid heuristic that incorporates ideas from linear programming (LP) and simulated annealing (SA). Extensive computational results comparing the performance of the heuristic with the lower bound obtained from the LP relaxation are presented. These results indicate that this price-influenced simulated annealing (PISA) procedure is extremely efficient, consistently providing solutions with average gaps of 0.30% or less in fewer than 30 s.