Hub Network Design

Abstract

Hub network design problems (HNDPs) lie at the heart of network design planning in transportation and telecommunications systems. Hub-based networks provide connections between many origins and destinations via hub facilities that serve as transshipment, consolidation, or sorting points for commodities. Hub facilities help to reduce the number of required arcs to connect all nodes and enable economies of scale due to the consolidation of flows on relatively few arcs. HNDPs can be seen as a class of multicommodity network design problems in which node selection decisions are taken into account. This chapter overviews the key features of hub networks, the types of decisions that are usually considered when designing them, and how these decisions interact between them. We describe commonly considered assumptions and properties and highlight how these impact the formulation and solution of various classes of HNDPs.