Design of hub-and-spoke networks applied to public transportation systems

Abstract

The growth of metropolitan areas steadily pushes governments to restructure and expand their public transport networks in order to improve urban mobility and lower traffic problems. In particular, reduce traffic congestion, energy consumption, air pollution, and vehicle accidents. Recently a new set of resources, based on the ideas of hub-and-spoke networks, has been cleverly incorporated into the design of public transportation systems. In hub-and-spoke systems, commodities from different origins are sent to intermediate facilities, known as hubs, which are responsible for the aggregation and distribution of the flows to multiple destinations. The use of hubs allows the connection of a large number of origin/destination (O/D) nodes with a small number of arcs. In this way, it is possible reduce the infrastructure and operational cost, besides enabling economies of scale to be applied to the transportation cost (or travel time) between hubs. In this work, different hub-and-spoke network design problems focused on public transportation system are proposed. Furthermore, mathematical programming formulations are presented to model the proposed problems while exact and heuristic algorithms are proposed to tackle them. Computational results obtained on benchmark instances confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.