a greedy heuristic solution for a hub-arc location problem considering set-up costs and isolated hub nodes

Transferring flow (passengers, goods, etc.) from origins to destinations is the main issue in transportation and logistics systems. hub networks are used in transportation problems to simplify routing and reduce total costs. in classic hub location problems, the full connection between all hub nodes and consequently making use of a fix discount factor for all inter-hub flows is assumed. given that such assumptions may lead to unrealistic results, the hub-arc location problem has been introduced to locate hub-arcs, instead of hub nodes, and allocate non-hub nodes to the hubs, so that the total transportation cost is minimized. in this paper, a kind of hub-arc location problem is developed which considers set-up costs and isolated hub nodes. moreover, a greedy heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the large-scale problem for the first time in the literature, which reached satisfactory answers in appropriate run-times. the sensitivity analysis shows that by decreasing the discount factor and increasing the number of exogenous hub-arcs, the number of origin-destination routes and access arcs will be reduced and system costs will be decreased.