Shipment Scheduling In Hub Location Problems

Abstract

In this thesis, we incorporate shipment scheduling decisions into hub location problems. Our aim is to determine optimal locations of hubs, hub network structure, and the number of vehicles to operate on the hub network as well as the time period of dispatching each vehicle from a hub. We develop mathematical models for di erent versions of this problem. We initially propose a mixed-integer shipment scheduling hub network design model where the costs of holding freight are negligible. We then expand the model to keep track of the holding decisions where the holding costs are not negligible. We further analyze the shipment scheduling model with holding costs when di erent types of vehicles are available to operate on the inter-hub links. We investigate the impact of shipment scheduling decisions and holding costs on hub network con gurations, routing decisions, and total cost of the network. We solve the models on instances from a new USAF dataset with real data.