A dynamic virtual hub location problem in airline networks - formulation and metaheuristic solution approaches

Controversial issues in the planning of air transportation networks are inclement weather. These issues cause incapacitation in hub facilities. In this situation, some other kinds of predetermined underutilized facilities in the network are used as virtual hubs to host some or all connections of original hubs to recover the incurred incapacitation and increase network flexibility and demand flow. In this paper, design of our network includes location of virtual hubs (VHs) and routing decision for any origin and destination nodes in the predetermined hub and spoke network in some scheduled periods to exploit the economies of scale. We present a new mathematical model for the dynamic virtual hub location routing problem (DVHLP). The presented model is concerned with minimizing the transportation and maintenance costs. Since the model is a NP-hard one, only small size problems can be solved optimally. Therefore, we propose two efficient metaheuristic approaches (ILS and HSA) to solve the DVHLP. We examine the effectiveness of our approaches using the well-known CAB data set and Turkish networks. Results indicate the better performance of HSA in comparison with ILS in terms of quality and CPU time.