Road Hub Location-Routing Issue in a Sparse and Distant Area

In order to manage the expenditures in a road transportation network in which the transport demands between cities are less than a truckload capacity, one needs to determine the location of hubs at first, and then collect the cargo from the cities in some routes which are assigned to the appropriate hubs. In this paper, a special case of hub location-routing issue was considered that is suitable for the particular conditions of Iran as cities are located in the sparse and distant places. A mixed integer mathematical programming model was proposed. As the model is NP-hard in nature, a two-phase hybrid method including genetic algorithms and simulated annealing was designed to solve the model. The results of the comparison between the model and the outputs demonstrated the accuracy and speed of the proposed solution method. Finally, a real case including all 31 capital cities of Iran provinces was solved to illustrate the appropriate performance of the solution method.