A New Mathematical Model for a Single Allocation P-hub Center Problem

Global transport is increasing, resulting in an added financial and environmental pressure on organizations and society as a whole. Hubs are facilities that serve as switching, trans-shipment and sorting points in many distribution systems. Hub devices are used as collection and distribution centers in many transportations networks. In practice, the use of hub networks results in time saving and reduction of transportation costs. The p-hub center problem is to locate p hubs and to allocate non-hub nodes to hub nodes such that the maximum travel time or distance between any origins to any destination is minimized. Successful application of such a system would result in cost, time and emissions savings for a business or organization. Applications of this problem are in airports, cargo delivery systems, postal networks and telecommunication systems. This paper presents a new mathematical model for the single allocation p-hub center problem that is a sub-problem of a hub location problem, in which hub locations are given. Furthermore, a numeric example of the given problem is solved. Finally, the computational results are reported and analyzed.