Summary: This paper discusses a design of a hybrid ring-mesh network in a survivable communication network. Given a set of traffic demands, the problem is to assign each traffic demand to rings and mesh such that the cost of add/drop multiplexer (ADM) and digital cross-connect system (DCS) equipment required is minimized. This assignment problem can be considered together with the fibre routing of nodes on rings and mesh. As a solution procedure, a tabu search is developed with recency-based short-term and frequency-based long-term memory structures. In computational experiments, the proposed tabu search is compared with the solutions obtained by the branch and bound procedure of CPLEX. We see that the tabu search provides a nearly optimal solution within sufficiently short time periods for all test problems with a gap of approximately 1--4\% from the lower bound.