“…For instance, depending on the criterion used for establishing the inter-hub connections, many related applications can then be seen as special cases of hub-and-spoke systems: (i) Multi-modal urban transportation (Bruno et al, 1998;Nickel et al, 2000;cGelareh, 2008;Chen et al, 2008;Marí n and Jaramillo, 2009), (ii) telecommunication networks (Hu, 1974;Kim and Tcha, 1992;Lee et al, 1994Lee et al, , 1996Klincewicz, 1998), (iii) tree-shaped facilities location problems (Kim et al, 1996;Puerto and Tamir, 2005), (iv) ring-star network designs Laporte and Martı´n, 2007), and (v) incomplete hub networks (Campbell et al, 2005a,b;Yoon and Current, 2008;Alumur and Kara, 2008a;Calik et al, 2009;Alumur et al, 2009).…”