A Green Approach on Multiple Allocation Hub Covering Flow Problem

Green supply chain applications are gaining wide interest as environmental and economic concerns have been increasing. Transportation authorities impose strict regulations to reduce the negative effect of transportation activities on the environment such as carbon emissions and noise. In this study, we introduce a novel optimization model for a green multiple allocation hub covering problem that seeks to find the best locations for hubs and allocation of origin/destination flows in a logistic network. Different from the existing hub covering flow problems, carbon emission costs is added to the total cost function aiming to minimize the total amount of emissions in the network. Further, we investigate the effect of several factors (e.g., coverage radii of hubs) on optimal solutions. To illustrate the efficiency of our approach over the conventional hub location models, we first generate a new dataset by combining a well-known dataset used in traditional hub covering problems with a carbon emission dataset provided by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Afterward, we present a comparison of our model to previous models that do not consider carbon emission.