Modeling and heuristic approaches for the Hub covering problem over incomplete Hub networks

Abstract

Hubs are the accumulation points within the transportation and the telecommunication networks that collect and distribute the flow or data, which is originated from a starting point and needs to be transferred to a destination point. The main application areas of the hub location problem are airline systems, telecommunication network design and cargo delivery systems. In the literature, a common treatment of hub location problems is under the classification dating back to the location literature. In this classification, four different types are identified. Namely, the p-hub median problem, the hub location problem with fixed costs, the p-hub center problem, and the hub covering problem in the literature. In most of the hub location studies, the hub networks are assumed to be complete; however, the observations on the real life cases showed that this may not be the case. Therefore, in this thesis, we relax this assumption and focus on the single allocation version of the hub covering problem over incomplete hub networks. We propose two new mathematical formulations and a tabu search based heuristic algorithm for this problem. We perform several computational experiments on the formulations with the CAB data set from the literature and a larger scale network corresponding to the cities in Turkey. The results we obtained from our experimentations reveals that designing incomplete hub networks to provide service within a given service time bound is cost effective in accordance with designing complete hub networks.