Abstract

We formulate the competitive hub location problem in which customers have gravity-like utility functions. In the resulting probabilistic model, customers choose an airline depending on a combination of functions of flying time and fare. The (conditional) follower's hub location problem is solved by means of a heuristic concentration method. Computational experience is obtained using the Australian data frequently used in the literature. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is viable even for problems of realistic size, and the results appear quite robust with respect to the leader's hub locations. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.