Shipment scheduling in hub location problems

Abstract In this paper, we incorporate shipment scheduling decisions into hub location problems. Our aim is to determine the optimal locations of hubs, hub network structure, and the number of dispatches to operate on the hub network as well as the time period of dispatching each vehicle from a hub. We develop three mixed-integer programming models for different versions of this problem, depending on whether holding costs are incorporated and whether the vehicles are of different types. We investigate the impact of shipment scheduling decisions and holding costs on hub network configurations, routing decisions, and total cost of the network. We solve the models on instances from a new dataset with real data.