Models and solution methods for some hub location problems

Abstract

In this thesis we study some hub location problems in the context of transportation networks. These are combinatorial optimization problems appearing in situations where there is a need of transporting some traffic, like items, people, and information, from many origins to many destinations. Instead of sending these flows using a direct shipment between all pairs of nodes in the network, a subset of these nodes is selected to use as hubs, with the aim of consolidating and distribute the flows. Thus, hubs induce a subnetwork that sends the traffic more efficiently and at a cheaper cost, allowing economies of scale when large amounts of traffic between nodes on this subnet are transported. We study different variants of hub location problems that try to model several real world situations and characteristics. In all of them, we aim to minimize the cost of sending traffic through the transportation network.