A hub-spoke air cargo network design model with hop-count constraint

Abstract

In this paper, we addressed a hub-andspoke network design problem for air-cargo systems. We considered the fixed costs of establishing the hubs and transportation arcs, as well as the variable costs of traversing these arcs. With these kinds of costs, we develop an optimization model for designing a hub-spoke network in air-cargo systems, including the hop-count constraint being used effectively to deliver freights. The problem is modeled as a variation of the multi-commoditynetwork flow problem. Exploiting the model structure, we may apply some well known heuristics to obtain a good feasible solution efficiently.