Hub Location and Hub Network Design

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Hubs are an important component of various transportation and telecommunications networks, functioning as switching, sorting, and connection points, as well as consolidation or break-bulk terminals. In transportation networks, a hub is a place where passengers and cargo are exchanged between vehicles or transportation modes. Examples of public transportation hubs include airports, railway stations, metro stations, and bus terminals. Freight hubs, on the other hand, may be truck terminals, classification yards, seaports, or any combination of these (intermodal terminals). Hubs in telecommunications networks include switches, routers, and concentrators. The main decisions in hub location problems are the location of hub facilities and the routing of flows to serve demand. Hub location problems in transportation networks involve locating hub facilities to handle flows of freight or passengers. While in telecommunications, they concern locating hardware to enable communication among a set of nodes. In this research, we aim to model and solve key problems integrating service network design decisions in hub location. We will focus on generic problems that can be extended to design a broad range of hub networks. We will consider different types of service levels, multiple transportation modes, and a heterogeneous vehicle fleet. We will determine which types of services to offer and the number and frequency of the vehicles to be utilized within the designed intermodal hub networks. We will model the effects of congestion and also analyze the trade-off between cost and service time. We will develop models and efficient algorithms for designing different hub network topologies from various service networks including public transportation and railway networks. We will provide efficient solutions to these challenging hub location and hub network design problems by developing novel mathematical formulations and exact or heuristic solution algorithms. We will perform extensive sensitivity analyses to derive managerial insights. The outcome will be a valuable tool for decision support in the transportation and logistics industry. The results will be used to design new hub networks and improve existing ones, such as postal delivery, express shipment delivery, public transportation, or freight railway networks currently operating in Canada. Highly qualified personnel with comprehensive knowledge on the subject will be trained. They will use their expertise, for example, as a solution developer, operations support specialist, or an operations manager to improve Canada's transportation, logistics, and telecommunications networks and help increase Logistics Performance Index rating of Canada in the long-term.