— We use panel data consisting of 96 countries and covering the period 1960–2000 to investigate the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) and hub-and-spoke systems of FTA on exports. Our empirical results imply an annual growth rate of 5.57% in exports and hence a doubling of exports after 12.4 years between FTA partners. Non-overlapping FTAs account for 4.12%, while hub-andspoke FTAs account...

The problem of staff scheduling at a truck hub for loading and stripping of the trucks is an important and difficult problem to optimize the labor efficiency and cost. The trucks enter the hub at different hours a day, in different known time schedules and operating hours. In this paper, we propose a goal programming to maximize the labor efficiency via minimizing the allocation cost. The propo...

The p-hub center problem is to locate p hubs and to allocate non-hub nodes to hub nodes such that the maximum travel time (or distance) between any origin–destination pair is minimized. We address the p-hub center allocation problem, a subproblem of the location problem, where hub locations are given. We present complexity results and IP formulations for several versions of the problem. We esta...

The BusPlus project aims at improving the off-peak hours public transit service in Canberra, Australia. To address the difficulty of covering a large geographic area, BusPlus proposes a hub and shuttle model consisting of a combination of a few high-frequency bus routes between key hubs and a large number of shuttles that bring passengers from their origin to the closest hub and take them from ...

In this paper, we formulate and solve an Imprecise Covering Ring Star Problem (ICRSP), which is a generalization of the (RSP). Here objective problem to find subset nodes in network minimize sum routing costs interconnecting cycle assignment are out cycle, their nearest concentrators such that no assigned node exceeds predetermined distance (say, covering distance) from concentrators. The dista...