Hub Location with Protection under Inter-Hub Link Failures

Abstract

This paper introduces the hub location problem under interhub link failures, a hub location problem in which activated interhub links may fail with a given probability. Two different optimization models are studied, which construct hub backbone networks protected under interhub link disruptions by imposing that, for each commodity, an additional routing path exists besides its original routing path. Both models consider the minimization of the fixed costs of the activated hubs and interhub links plus the expected value of the routing costs of the original and alternative paths. The first model builds explicitly the alternative routing paths, whereas the secondmodel guarantees that, for each commodity, at least one alternative path exists using a large set of connectivity constraints although the alternative paths are not built explicitly. The results of extensive computational testing allow us to analyze the performance of the two proposed models and to evaluate the extra cost required to design a robust backbone network under interhub link failures. The obtained results support the validity of the proposal.