Simulated annealing-based algorithm for the capacitated hub routing problem

Abstract

Routing traffic across a capacitated hub-and-spoke network is very common in freight transportation and telecommunications. Most of the hub-and-spoke network models available in the literature assume a fully inter-connected hub network and allow traffic to pass through a maximum of two hubs. In the absence of a fully inter-connected hub network, the traffic may have to be routed through more than two hubs. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model and a simulated annealing (SA)-based solution methodology for routing freight through not more than three hubs in a given capacitated network. We generate test problem instances to evaluate the efficacy of the mathematical model and the meta-heuristic procedure. The effect of each network parameter on the performance of the SA procedure is analysed thoroughly with extensive computational experiments and relevant statistical tests. The results show that near-optimal solutions for large problem instances can be derived in little computational time.

Integrated hub location and flow processing schedule problem under renewable capacity constraint

“…To formulate the capacitated hub location problem, the common approach is to consider the hub capacity over a given time period, which is calculated based on net capacity times the length of time period [e.g. da Graça Costa et al (2008), Correia et al (2013) and Kumar and Sivakumar (2013)]. In this approach the capacity is nonrenewable, meaning that the available capacity of a hub gets updated when a flow is allocated to the hub but it is not re-calculated when the transiting flow leaves the hub.…”