¹Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

Correspondence: BY Kara, Department of Industrial Engineering, Bilkent University, Bilkent, Ankara 06800, Turkey. E-mail: bkara@bilkent.edu.tr

Received November 2007; Accepted June 2008; Published online 8 October 2008.

Abstract

Hub location problems involve locating hub facilities and allocating demand nodes to hubs in order to provide service between origin–destination pairs. In this study, we focus on cargo applications of the hub location problem. Through observations from the Turkish cargo sector, we propose a new mathematical model for the hub location problem that relaxes the complete hub network assumption. Our model minimizes the cost of establishing hubs and hub links, while designing a network that services each origin–destination pair within a time bound. We formulate a single-allocation hub covering model that permits visiting at most three hubs on a route. The model is then applied to the realistic instances of the Turkish network and to the Civil Aeronautics Board data set.