Provider selection and task allocation problems under fuzzy QoS constraints and volume discount pricing policy for telecommunication network

Abstract

Nowadays every firm uses telecommunication networks to continue their existence and complete their daily operations. In this paper, we investigate an optimization problem that a firm faces when acquiring network capacity from a market in which there exist several network providers offering different pricing and quality of service schemes. In the mathematical model, quality of service level guaranteed by network providers and minimum quality of service level which is needed to accomplishing operations are denoted as fuzzy numbers. Finally, a heuristic solution procedure is proposed to solve resulting nonlinear mixed integer programming model with fuzzy coefficients.