A simulated annealing-based heuristic for the single allocation maximal covering hub location problem

Abstract: Hub location problem is one of the most important problems in the areas of logistics and telecommunication network design. In this paper, we address the single allocation maximal covering hub location problem in which the objective is to maximise the amount of covered flows associated with origin-destination pairs in a hub-and-spoke network using a fixed number of hub facilities. Two mathematical programming formulations are developed for the problem and since the problem belongs to the class of NP-hard problems, an efficient simulated annealing (SA)-based heuristic is proposed to solve it. Computational results indicate the efficiency of the proposed heuristic both in terms of solution quality and CPU time.