Research On Road Express Freight Hub-and-Spoke Network With Time Window

The rapid development of economy and society and the increasing market demands have spawned the road express freight, especially less-than-one carloads industry's booming rise, recently. The number of domestic road express enterprises has been growing, followed by the increasing fierce competition between enterprises. In the final analysis, the essence of competition has two aspects:lowering enterprises'transportation cost and improving service level. So, it's quite important to build an efficient and appropriate operation network, which can effectively decrease transportation costs, reduce the economic burden of enterprises, and can provide good service to win customers'trust and satisfaction.Hub-and-spoke network originates from the wheel's hub-and-spoke structure, which was used in aviation system in the beginning and achieved good economic benefit. This kind of network can effectively integrate logistics resources, reduce the transportation cost and improve efficiency of logistics resource utilization. It's also suitable for road express industry with timeliness demands, whose goods sources have high uncertainty.In the traditional hub-and-spoke freight network, every freight station must connect with the hub, namely goods can't reach purpose without the hub's transfer. In some special circumstances, such as goods flow is bigger between two stations, distance is shorter, time is pressing and so on, the traditional hub-and-spoke network is difficult to adapt.Therefore, direct routes are added to the traditional hub-and-spoke network in my paper, and the freight station can transport goods to the purpose freight station without the hub's transfer in special circumstances. The paper adds time windows limit in order to guarantee the quality of service and timeliness. It not only reduces the number of transfer, but also guarantees that the goods can arrive to the consignee within the stipulated time. The paper proposes a hybrid hub-and-spoke network model with time windows, and adopts Lingo software to test its accurateness, using the genetic algorithm for its solution. The results show that the network model proposed can maximize the transportation cost saving under the premise of timeliness.