The maximal detour liner shipping hub location problem: Improving the applicability of the p-hub center problem

This paper investigates a novel maximal detour hub location problem arising in liner shipping, referred to as a maximal detour liner shipping hub location problem, which can be regarded as a novel p-hub center problem. Different from conventional formulations of the p-hub center problem, both cost and service can be kept at a good level based on our investigated problem, although economic objectives are not considered in our problem. By considering origin–destination (OD) path based detour and sub-path based detours, we propose three mixed-integer linear programming models for our problem. The proposed formulations with sub-path based detours can be efficiently solved by CPLEX. To efficiently solve our formulation with OD path based detour, we propose an improved Benders decomposition algorithm, where the inspection strategy, the heuristic strategy and the multi-cut strategy are developed for improving algorithm efficiency. Finally, we provide numerical experiments to account for the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed formulations and algorithm.