With the increasing demand for high-quality internet services, deploying GPON/Fiber-to-the-Home networks is one of the biggest challenges that internet providers have to deal with due to the significant investments involved. Automated network design usage becomes more critical to aid with planning the network by minimising the costs of planning and deployment. The main objective is to tackle this problem of optimisation of networks that requires taking into account multiple factors such as the equipment placement and their configuration, the optimisation of the cable routes, the optimisation of the clients' allocation and other constraints involved in the minimisation problem. An AI-based solution is proposed to automate network design, which is a task typically done manually by teams of engineers. It is a difficult task requiring significant time to complete manually. To alleviate this tiresome task, we proposed a Genetic Algorithm using a two-level representation to design the networks automatically. To validate the approach, we compare the quality of the generated solutions with the handmade design ones that are deployed in the real world. The results show that our method can save costs and time in finding suitable and better solutions than existing ones, indicating its potential as a support design tool of solutions for GPON/Fiber-to-the-Home networks. In concrete, in the two scenarios where we validate our proposal, our approach can cut costs by 31% and by 52.2%, respectively, when compared with existing handmade ones, showcasing and validating the potential of the proposed approach.

翻译：随着对高质量互联网服务需求的日益增长，部署GPON/光纤到户网络已成为互联网提供商面临的最大挑战之一，因为其中涉及巨额投资。自动化网络设计的使用变得愈加重要，它通过最小化规划和部署成本来辅助网络规划。主要目标是解决这一网络优化问题，该问题需要综合考虑设备布置及其配置、电缆路由优化、客户分配优化以及最小化问题中涉及的其他约束条件。本文提出了一种基于人工智能的解决方案来自动化网络设计，而这一任务通常由工程师团队手动完成。手动完成该任务难度大且耗时。为了减轻这一繁重任务，我们提出了一种采用双层表示的遗传算法来自动设计网络。为了验证该方法的有效性，我们将生成方案的质量与实际部署的手工设计方案进行了比较。结果表明，我们的方法能够在寻找比现有方案更合适、更优的解决方案时节省成本和时间，这表明其作为GPON/光纤到户网络解决方案支持设计工具的潜力。具体而言，在我们验证方案的两种场景中，与现有手工设计方案相比，我们的方法分别能降低成本31%和52.2%，从而展示并验证了所提方法的潜力。