The hub covering problem over incomplete hub networks

Abstract

The rising trend in the transportation and telecommunication systems increases the importance of hub location studies in recent years. Hubs are special types of facilities in many-to-many distribution systems where flows are consolidated and disseminated. Analogous to location models, p-hub median, p-hub center and hub covering problems have been studied in the literature. In this thesis, we focus on a special type of hub covering problem which we call as “Hub Covering Problem over Incomplete Hub Networks”. Most of the studies in the hub location literature assume that the hub nodes are fully interconnected. We observe that, especially in cargo delivery systems, hub network is not complete. Thus, in this study we relax this fundamental assumption and propose integer programming models for single and multi allocation cases of the hub covering problem. We also propose three heuristics for both single and multi allocation cases of the problem. During the computational performance of proposed models and heuristics, CAB data was used. Results and comparisons of these heuristics will also be discussed.