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Abstract

A method for rapidly restoring disrupted communications services between nodes of a network following a loss of service due to a circuit outage such as may occur, for example, as a result of an optical fiber cable break. The method is operable, however, irrespective of the transmission technology. Treating the telecommunications traffic as a commodity, a multicommodity model is developed using a measure of the commodities desired to be restored between network nodes and the capacity available for restoral in spare and impacted edges of the network. Action variables are established by use of representational 'dummy nodes pairs' interconnected by 'action edges.' A multicommodity algorithm is applied to the model and to the decision variables to determine reroutes and actions to be taken within nodes of the network to effect the restoral reroutes. Preferably, the process is carried out in real time or near real time by computing apparatus and such that the outage is located via a control network and whereby the instructions for restoral actions are returned to the network nodes. Operation also preferably takes into consideration the priority of the telecommunications commodity to be restored and the relative costs of restoral so that higher priority commodities are restored first at lowest cost.

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