Studies of random demands on network costs

When network demands are uncertain, a planner might design a network based on some nominal set of point-to-point demands, and later be faced with a di fferent set of offered demands. To accommodate the offered demands, modific ation of the network may be required. Given this scenario, it seems natural to question how these modification costs might affect the overall cost. To address such questions, we study the effects of random demands on network costs. In this study, we design a network based on nominal demands, generat e random demands based on the nominal demands, and then modify the designed network to carry the random demands. We generate the offered demands rando mly from four different distributions. For each demand distribution we perf orm 300 simulations. This paper describes our observations.