A multi-objective hub covering location problem under congestion using simulated annealing algorithm

Hub covering problem is one of the most popular areas of research due to wide ranges of applications in different service or manufacturing industries. This paper considers a multi-objective hub covering location problem under congestion. The proposed study of this paper considers two objectives where the first one minimizes total transportation cost and the second one minimizes total waiting time for all hobs. The resulted multi-objective decision making problem is formulated as mixed integer programming. Simulated annealing is used to solve the resulted model and the performance of the proposed model is compared against two other alternative methods, particle sward optimization and NSGA-II. The results are compared in terms of four criteria including quality metric, mean ideal distance, diversification metric and spacing metric. The results indicate that the proposed model could perform better than the other two alternative methods in terms of quality metric but the results are somehow mix in terms of other three criteria.