Upgrading service availability of optical networks: A labor force perspective

Service availability is an important issue in optical networks. Much research attention has been drawn to the provisioning of reliable connections achieved by approaches such as routing and wavelength assignment and by protection and restoration mechanisms. In contrast, the research on upgrading networks to meet new or dynamic demands of service availability based on network upgrading process has been comparatively lacking. In this paper, we address this issue by upgrading service availability from the perspective of labor forces for network maintenance. Our approach is premised on the assumption that the time period for fixing an optical link can be reduced by using more network resources of labor forces. To model this concept, we conduct Amdahl's law, a well‐known theorem in parallel computing, to describe human teamwork. To show the effectiveness of this concept, we propose mixed integer linear programming aiming at either maximizing service availability under limited labor forces or minimizing labor forces for predetermined service availability. In addition, a heuristic algorithm for upgrading service availability is presented. Our experimental results show that our network upgrading process can improve service availability optimally with a fixed number of forces and the proposed heuristic algorithm can effectively save computation time.