Research on Hub-and-Spoke Transportation Network of China Railway Express

Abstract

China Railway Express is developing rapidly, but the point-to-point direct organization mode has brought many problems to it. Therefore, this paper proposes to construct a hub-and-spoke network and adopt the “collecting and transportation” organization mode. In this paper, based on the single distribution p-hub median problem, a dual-objective planning model was constructed by considering the characteristics of CR Express in terms of cost and time. In addition, considering the port as a key node of international rail transport network, it plays a vital role for CR Express. Therefore, a hub-port allocation model was constructed to determine the hub-port allocation relationship. Furthermore, a Lagrangian relaxation heuristic algorithm was designed to solve the model built for CR Express transportation network. Finally, based on the constructed model, the actual operation data of CR Express were used in the designed example to verify the effectiveness and applicability of the models and methods.