In the Summer of 2018, I worked under Joseph Cheriyan at the University of Waterloo on a problem in Survivable Network Design. In particular, we looked at the vertex-connectivity survivable network design (VC-SNDP), which asks us, given integer requirements between pairs of nodes in a network, to find a minimal set of edges such that there are at least as many vertex-disjoint paths between the pairs as the requirement. I gave a presentation at the end of the term with some good introduction and background:
I didn’t make publishable progress on the problem, but I did have some ideas and small results that may or may not be relevant, and I documented many of them in the following document:
I don’t think that document is totally readable to someone without a background in network design research, but it may shed some more light on what the project was about.