The design of capacitated intermodal hub networks with different vehicle types

• Different transportation modes and vehicles types are allowed on hub networks.
• A mixed-integer programming formulation is provided.
• An efficient heuristic algorithm is developed.
• Extensive computational analyzes are conducted on CAB and Turkish data sets.

In this study, we allow using alternative transportation modes and different types of vehicles in the hub networks to be designed. The aim of the problem is to determine the locations and capacities of hubs, which transportation modes to serve at hubs, allocation of non-hub nodes to hubs, and the number of vehicles of each type to operate on the hub network to route the demand between origin-destination pairs with minimum total cost. Total cost includes fixed costs of establishing hubs with different capacities, purchasing and operational costs of vehicles, transportation costs, and material handling costs. A mixed-integer programming model is developed and a variable neighborhood search algorithm is proposed for the solution of this problem. The heuristic algorithm is tested on instances from the Turkish network and CAB data set. Extensive computational analyzes are conducted in order to observe the effects of changes in various problem parameters on the resulting hub networks.