**6. Conclusions**

This chapter discussed the generalized Steiner problem with survivable and reliable constraints (GSP-SRC), combining the network survivability and network reliability approaches, to design large-size reliable networks. In addition, a heuristic algorithm was introduced in order to solve the GSP-SRC that combines the GRASP and VNS meta-heuristics (for design and optimization) and the RVR simulation technique for estimating the network reliability of the solutions built.

After testing the algorithm hereby introduced on 60 instances of the GSP-SRC problem, all solutions shared the following desirable facts:


Given the fact that the GSP-SRC is a NP-hard problem, it is the authors' view that the times per iteration are highly competitive (less than 173 seconds in the worst case).
