  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.
