Mehrperiodige Standortplanung in kapazitierten Hubnetzwerken

The increase of e-commerce has a tremendous effect on logistic service providers such as parcel delivery services. Since an increasing number of customers shop online these providers face a growing demand for their services. In addition the demand from online customers is highly fluctuating and companies with big transportation volumes like Amazon.com Inc. select their logistic service providers based on least cost criteria and award most often short term contracts. The ever increasing speed of changes in the cost and demand structure forces companies to reconfigure their network frequently. We contribute by developing a multi-period approach that incorporates these changes and enables optimal configuration of hub location networks. We consider a multi-period single allocation hub location problem with multiple capacity levels. Which locations serve as hubs, the capacity of these hubs and the allocation of non-hub locations to hub locations are the key decisions in each period. Several formulations of mixed integer programs for the multi-period model are proposed. We develop and evaluate heuristics to solve large-scale problems. We compare the models and heuristics in terms of computational performance