Hub covering location problems with different coverage types

The hub location problem is used for many applications, including cargo delivery systems, airline systems, telecommunication network design and so on. Each area has its own characteristics in hub location. In this paper, we study the hub covering problem with different coverage type over complete hub networks. Furthermore, hub set and maximal covering are expressed with single and multiple allocation strategies. First, a quadratic formulation is proposed for single allocation hub set covering problem. Then a linearization idea is considered for it and applied for multiple allocation hub set, single and multiple allocation hub maximal covering problems. The aim of these models is to find the location of hubs and allocate non-hub nodes to the located hub nodes subject to the travel time ( cost or distance) between two nodes in origin-destination doesn't exceed a given bound. The formulations with this coverage constraint have not been remarked in the literature. Two heuristic procedures are proposed to handle these models in an agreeable solution quality and computational time. The computational experience of Turkish dataset was presented for better illustration of proposed model. And a special application on Iranian hub airports location is discussed. (C) 2012 Sharif University of Technology. Production and hosting by Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.