Hub Covering Location Problem under Capacity Constraints

Abstract

The hub location problem appears in a variety of applications including airline systems, cargo delivery systems, and telecommunication network design. When we analyze hub location applications separately, we observe that each area has its own characteristics. In this paper, we study the single allocation hub covering problem under capacity constraints (or CSAHCLP - Capacitate Single Allocation Hub Covering Location Problem) over complete hub networks and propose a mixed-integer programming formulation to this end. The aim of our model is to find the location of hubs and allocate non-hub nodes to the located hub nodes so much that the travel cost between any hub-node pair is within a given cost bound and hubs are considered under capacity constraint. Unlike [1] we prepare new formulation with covering radius. In general this paper attempts to propose a new mixed-integer programming formulation and adapt the imperialist competitive algorithm to solve the hub covering location problem. Also unlike previous studies, we adapt new solution algorithm (Imperialist competitive algorithm) for solving our problem that has not used yet.