Models and Partial Re-Optimization Heuristics for Dynamic Hub-and-Spoke Transferring Route Problems

The major advantages of hub-and-spoke network are the reduction of the number of routes and the effect of economies of scale, which can effectively save the shipping cost of the transportation industry. In the landside pick-up services of the international express industry, the application of such a model has achieved high efficient transit operations. The entire operational area is divided into numbers of partitions. Each partition sets up a station as the cargo collection place (meeting point). Vehicle routes meet here to consolidate goods that collected from customers into truckload shipment and transfer those to regional centers by larger trucks. In this study, the dynamic vehicle routing problem are extended to this type of hub-and-spoke network architecture, which make it different from the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), and is formulated as the Dynamic Hub-and-Spoke Problem with Transferring Route (DHSPTR). Test problems with dynamic pickup flows of export goods under H-S networks are designed to evaluate the proposed hybrid ACO solution methods. Partial re-optimization heuristics are realized by ACO for its ability to keep the solution status while new demands keep coming during the process and are inserted to existing routes dynamically.