The incomplete hub-covering location problem considering imprecise location of demands

Abstract

Facility location is a prime decision to be made in many organizations around the globe. The hub location problem is one of the main variants of the facility location problem, with applications in telecommunications, the airline industry, and etc. In this paper, we deal with an incomplete hub-covering network design problem, where the exact locations of demands are unknown and are estimated as fuzzy variables. An earlier model in the hub location literature has been modified to address the uncertainty in the problem. In order to solve this problem, an efficient simulation-embedded Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) has been designed and its performance has been validated using the well-known CAB dataset. (C) 2013 Sharif University of Technology. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.