Solving a capacitated hub location problem

In this paper we address a problem consisting of determining the routes and the hubs to be used in order to send, at minimum cost, a set of commodities from sources to destinations in a given capacitated network. The capacities and costs of the arcs and hubs are given, and the arcs connecting the hubs are not assumed to create a complete graph. We present a mixed integer linear programming formulation and describe two branch-and-cut algorithms based on decomposition techniques. We evaluate and compare these algorithms on instances with up to 25 commodities and 10 potential hubs. One of the contributions of this paper is to show that a Double Benders’ Decomposition approach outperforms the standard Benders’ Decomposition, which has been widely used in recent articles on similar problems. For larger instances we propose a heuristic approach based on a linear programming relaxation of the mixed integer model. The heuristic turns out to be very effective and the results of our computational experiments show that near-optimal solutions can be derived rapidly. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.