Reusing software components in telecommunications network engineering

This paper proposes a methodology for reusing the graph theory algorithms in telecommunications network design. After having briefly defined the main aspects of network planning such as routing, reliability, network configuration, and so on, it characterizes the different situations where basic algorithms of graph theory could be reused. The statement of the principles for adapting software components has allowed us to specify the main steps of the proposed methodology: selection, modification and integration. The implementation and test of this methodology show that reusing software components can significantly improve the developers' productivity, as well as the quality of network design software, as the reused components are already intensively tested in a wide variety of situations. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.