A Multi-Hub Express Shipment Service Network Design Model with Flexible Hub Assignments
(2016) EURO 2016 : 28th European Conference on Operational Research — Location: Poznan, Poland (3.July.2016)
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- Authors
- Abstract
- The express carriers offer overnight, door-to-door delivery of shipments, within regions as large as the US, Europe or the Middle East. For ensuring the reliability and efficiency of their service, they need to determine a set of feasible routes that enable the transportation of shipments from their origins to their destinations, a problem known as the Express Shipment Service Network Design (ESSND) problem. For reaching economies of scale, the express integrators first consolidate the shipments by moving them from their origin to hubs, where the shipments are sorted by destination, and then they are transported from the hubs to the destinations. Most of the existing approaches for solving multi-hub version of this problem rely on a fixed hub assignment, i.e. the allocation shipments to hubs is an input of the problem. In this research, we develop an optimization model for addressing the ESSND for the next day deliveries within a region, with multiple hubs and with flexible hub assignment. The flexible hub assignment incorporates the hub allocation decision of the shipment to the network design model. We provide a reformulation that improves the LP relaxation and reduces the number of variables and constraints compared to existing models in the literature, and that includes complex route structures. Our model is tested using extensive numerical experiments to show the value added in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, based on instances in the European region.
- Affiliations
Louvain School of Management Operations and Information
Citations
Quesada Perez, J. M., Lange, J.-C., & Tancrez, J.-S. (2016). A Multi-Hub Express Shipment Service Network Design Model with Flexible Hub Assignments. EURO 2016 : 28th European Conference on Operational Research, Poznan, Poland. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/178888