An efficient tabu search for solving the uncapacitated single allocation hub location problem

•Given an efficient tabu search the uncapacitated single allocation hub location problem.•Given some new tabu rules.•Given some new theoretical results for computing the changes in the objective function’s value for three types of moves.•Improved the best known solution for some benchmark problems without known optimal solution.

We here propose an efficient tabu search (TS) for solving the uncapacitated single allocation hub location problem. To decrease the computational time, in the proposed tabu search, some new tabu rules are considered. Also, to compute the changes in the objective function’s value in each move, some new results are given. The performance of the proposed tabu search is compared with a recently proposed tabu search (Silva & Cunha, 2009) on all standard ORLIB instances (CAB and AP data sets), modified AP data set and finally on four large instances with 300 and 400 nodes proposed by Silva and Cunha. The numerical experiments show that the proposed tabu search can find all optimal solutions of CAB data and the best known solution of other standard test problems in less computational time than Silva and Cunha’s tabu search. Also, the proposed tabu search can improve the best known solutions for some standard test problems.