A hub covering model for cargo delivery systems

Abstract

The hub location problem appears in a variety of applications including airline systems, cargo delivery systems, and telecommunication network design. When we analyze the application areas separately, we observe that each area has its own characteristics. In this research we focus on cargo delivery systems. Our interviews with various cargo delivery firms operating in Turkey enabled us to determine the constraints, requirements, and criteria of the hub location problem specific to the cargo delivery sector. We present integer programming formulations and large-scale implementations of the models within Turkey. The results are compared with the current structure of a cargo delivery firm operating in Turkey.

A hub covering network design problem for cargo applications in Turkey

“…The travel times (t i j ) between all nodes on the network can be obtained from Kara (2008). The fixed costs for locating hub facilities (FH j ) are taken from a previous study by Tan and Kara (2007). Various factors, such as the industrialization level, the in and out cargo intensity, land price, and the highway intensity of different cities have been considered in determining these fixed costs.…”

“…Their objective was to minimize the arrival time of the last-arrived item, while accounting for both the flight times and the time spent at hubs for unloading, loading and sorting operations. Tan and Kara (2007) applied the latest arrival hub covering version to the cargo delivery sector in Turkey. Yaman et al (2007) incorporated multiple stopovers into the latest arrival hub centre model to determine vehicle routes.…”

Release Time Scheduling and Hub Location for Next-Day Delivery

“…They first define the minisum, minimax, and covering versions of the problem and then focus on the minimax version. Later, Tan and Kara (2007) focus on the distribution network design problem of a typical cargo delivery company operating in Turkey; this study is a variant of the latest arrival hub covering problem.…”

“…In the Turkey network, we aggregated the branch offices into 81 cities (see also Tan andYaman 2009). Hubs can be chosen from a subset of 22 cities that are currently serving as hubs for our company.…”

Cumulative Vehicle Routing Problems

“…Our model has 5 types of parameters: travel distances between each city pair, the demand of each city, the number of trucks (vehicle), tare and capacity of a truck. For the travel distances, we used the data proposed by Tan & Kara (2007)) which is available at (www.bilkent.edu.tr\~bkara/hubloc.htm). For the demand of each city we assumed that each individual generates 10 -5 kg of reusable materials and so scaled the population of each city with that tare.…”