College of Business Administration & Center for Transportation Studies
University of Missouri - St. Louis
One University Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 623121-4499
USA
Trucking operations provide a rich source of decision problems for the Operations Research/Management Sciences (OR/MS) community. While there has been considerable successful and prominent OR/MS research on tactical service network design, especially for less-than-truckload (LTL) motor carriers, there has been much less work on strategic network design for trucking. This presentation addresses three related areas involving hub location, strategic network design and trucking. The first part of the presentation reviews strategic network design models for locating consolidation/breakbulk terminals in LTL and postal networks, and for locating relay points in truckload (TL) networks. The second part of the presentation provides a brief overview of hub location research, including a family of new hub arc location models. The third part of the presentation describes recent research on developing a hub arc location model for designing networks for time-definite trucking. We conclude with a discussion of some promising areas for future research.