Release Time Scheduling and Hub Location for Next-Day Delivery
Author
Yaman, H.
Karasan, O. E.
Kara, B. Y.
Date
2012-02-01Source Title
Operations Research
Print ISSN
0030-364X
Publisher
INFORMS
Volume
60
Issue
4
Pages
906 - 917
Language
English
Type
ArticleItem Usage Stats
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Show full item recordAbstract
Inspired by a real-life problem faced by one of the largest ground-based cargo companies of Turkey, the current study
introduces a new facet to the hub location literature. The release time scheduling and hub location problem aims to select a
specified number of hubs from a fixed set of demand centers, to allocate each demand center to a hub, and to decide on the
release times of trucks from each demand center in such a way that the total amount of cargo guaranteed to be delivered
to every potential destination by the next day is not below a threshold and the total routing cost is minimized. The paper
introduces integer programming models to solve this problem in the special cases when the cargo uniformly arrives to each
demand center during the day and the more realistic pattern of when the cargo arrivals exhibit a piecewise linear form.
Several classes of valid inequalities are proposed to strengthen the formulations. Extensions with multiple service levels
and discrete sets for release times are also discussed. Computational results show the computational viability of the models
under realistic scenarios as well as the validity of the proposed problems in answering several interesting questions from
the cargo sector’s perspective.