Hub Location Models in Public Transport Planning

Logistics and especially public transport network (PTN) design is one of the main concerns of the current and near future of many developed and developing countries. The consequences of inefficiencies in the public transport (PT) system, more than anywhere else, is more evident in the urban systems of existing and newly emerging economies. Nonetheless, even in presence of such concerns, study of PTNs in conjunction with the structures which are known due to their high efficiency is not very well studied. One class of such models is Hub Location Problems (HLPs). Hub Location Problems (HLPs) have received a lot of attention in the last two decades in different application fields. However, research for public transport is still scarce. In this dissertation, new and flexible mathematical models and solution approaches (decomposition schemes and metaheuristics) are proposed for the applications of hub-and-spoke networks in the PT planning. They are shown to be superior to existing ones in literature. Moreover, flexibility of the models allows a wide scope of scenarios to be described by them. Among them, there exist the first model for planning to develop PTNs over a planning horizon.