A general variable neighborhood search for solving the uncapacitated r-allocation p-hub median problem

The $p$ ‐hub median problem consists of choosing $p$ hub locations from a set of nodes with pairwise traffic demands in order to route the traffic between the origin‐destination pairs at minimum cost. We accept general assumption that transportation between non‐hub nodes is possible only via $r$ ‐hub nodes, to which non‐hub nodes are assigned. In this paper we propose a general variable neighborhood search heuristic to solve the problem in an efficient and effective way. Moreover, for the first time full nested variable neighborhood descent is applied as a local search within Variable neighborhood search. Computational results outperform the current state‐of‐the‐art results obtained by GRASP based heuristic.