On the use of guided design search for discovering significant decision variables in the fixed‐charge capacitated multicommodity network design problem
Mark W. Lewis · Networks · 2008
Abstract A preprocessing technique, Guided Design Search (GDS), is presented for the fixed‐charge multicommodity capacitated network design (FCMD) problem. GDS applies design of experiment (DOE) principles in order to identify the critical edges in FCMD by analyzing the observed effects of tests using strictly generated sets of edge inclusion/exclusion decisions. Reasoning that these critical edges will exist in most of the high‐quality solutions, they are set to their appropriate value, resulting in a reduced solution space for FCMD. High‐quality solutions to this reduced FCMD were found quickly and often improved on those found for the unreduced problem. GDS is shown to dominate several other approaches for reducing the solution space. This success serves to broaden the applicability of experimental design screening and preprocessing techniques. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, 2009