Mixed truck delivery systems with both hub-and-spoke and direct shipment

This paper studies a mixed truck delivery system that allows both hub-and-spoke and direct shipment delivery modes. A heuristic algorithm is developed to determine the mode of delivery for each demand and to perform vehicle routing in both modes of deliveries. Computational experiments are carried out on a large set of randomly generated problem instances to compare the mixed system with the pure hub-and-spoke system and the pure direct shipment system. The experiment results show that the mixed system can save around 10% total traveling distance on average as compared with either of the two pure systems. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.