  We investigate the 3-architecture Connected Facility Location Problem arising
in the design of urban telecommunication access networks. We propose an
original optimization model for the problem that includes additional variables
and constraints to take into account wireless signal coverage. Since the
problem can prove challenging even for modern state-of-the art optimization
solvers, we propose to solve it by an original primal heuristic which combines
a probabilistic fixing procedure, guided by peculiar Linear Programming
relaxations, with an exact MIP heuristic, based on a very large neighborhood
search. Computational experiments on a set of realistic instances show that our
heuristic can find solutions associated with much lower optimality gaps than a
state-of-the-art solver.
