Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
COMPUTERS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH, cilt.192, 2026 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
For many transportation and telecommunication companies, providing equitable service to clients is an important priority, which can be achieved by solving p-hub center problems. However, due to the NP-hard nature of the p-hub center problem, tackling realistic instances of such problems in a reasonable time is not an easy task at all. This study addresses the uncapacitated r-allocation p-hub center problem, and proposes two solution approaches for it. The first is a Benders decomposition algorithm that obtains proven optimal solutions for medium and large instances, whereas the second is a matheuristic approach that is able to solve very large instances of the problem in short computational times. The matheuristic algorithm is composed of two components, one for determining the location of hubs and the other for the allocation of non-hub nodes to the hubs. Both components use Benders decomposition for solving the related problems, and are run in an iterative manner to guide the search in converging to high-quality solutions. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated by conducting a comprehensive set of computational experiments using different test instances with up to over 400 nodes. The obtained results indicate the superiority of the proposed methods compared to the state-of-the-art, both in terms of solution quality and computational time.