Submarine Cable Path Planning Based on Weight Selection of Design Considerations

Submarine cables are indispensable in today’s international data transmission. In the process of submarine cable path planning, any factors that may potentially affect reliability and cost should be considered. Still, the degree of importance of these factors is difficult to assess accurately. Currently, cable path planning is done manually, meter by meter, over thousands of kilometers by experts that rely on their experience and expertise. This paper provides a submarine cable path planning algorithm based on simulated annealing (SA) and the fast marching method (FMM). It is called FMM/SA and can be used as a guide and benchmark for cable path planners and also enhances understanding of the multiple considerations and their corresponding weights aiming to further improve the end-results beyond what is obtained currently by experts. In FMM/SA, SA is used to optimize weights of design considerations to minimize the Fréchet distance between existing cable paths and paths with minimized total life-cycle cost obtained by FMM. FMM/SA is demonstrated to be superior to two other algorithms based on random-restart hill-climbing and Monte Carlo using real-life cable paths.