Using simulated annealing to solve the p-hub median problem

Locating hub facilities is important in different types of transportation and communication networks. The p-Hub Median Problem (p-HMP) addresses a class of hub location problems in which all hubs are interconnected and each non-hub node is assigned to a single hub. The hubs are uncapacitated, and their number p is initially determined. Introduces an Artificial Intelligence (AI) heuristic called simulated annealing to solve the p-HMP. The results are compared against another AI heuristic, namely Tabu Search, and against two other non-AI heuristics. A real world data set of airline passenger flow in the USA, and randomly generated data sets are used for computational testing. The results confirm that AI heuristic approaches to the p-HMP outperform non-AI heuristic approaches on solution quality.