Abstract:

This paper addresses the Uncapacitated Single Allocation p-hub Maximal Covering Problem (USApHMCP), which aims to determine the best allocation for the p-hubs within a node network in order to maximize the network coverage. We proposed a search strategy-based heuristic Basic Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) to solve the problem. Two different sets of test instances from the literature, Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and Australian Post (AP), were used to evaluate the performance of VNS and to compare it with the Tabu Search (TS) metaheuristic. In most instances, the bounds obtained by VNS and TS were the same but, on the other hand, for some of them, VNS presented a slight advantage and vice versa. That is, both algorithms are convenient to solve the proposed problem.