Hub locations in urban multimodal networks.

The present paper deals with the problem of locating hubs for freight mobility in urban and suburban areas. In particular, we present a heuristic method that combines aspects coming from both classical simple plant location problems and shortest path ones on multimodal graphs. In the first phase of the proposed heuristics, we identify those nodes that could be attractive poles for being logistics platforms. In this phase we select the possible modal change nodes by analysing their communication capabilities with the other nodes of the network, such as depots, transit points, retail points, main accesses to the highways and railways. In the second phase, we first compute shortest mono-modal paths looking for well performing modal change nodes from both the required origin and destination nodes. Then, we evaluate the generalized cost of the corresponding possible multimodal path visiting the previously selected commuting points thus being able to identify the best location for the required hubs in the whole logistic network among the set of candidate nodes. Computational experiences and results concerning the logistic network of the metropolitan area of the city of Genoa are reported.