The nature of products plays an important role in choosing the suitable hub location model, particularly in multi-commodity freight transportation. The hub median problem is widely used but the hub center problem is usually more suitable for planning huge networks, or planning delivery of perishable or time-sensitive cargos. Multi-commodity is critical in the distribution of sensitive cargo such as perishable and hazardous products. In practice, there are some preservation or safety restrictions in consolidating such cargo that affects their flow and might affect the design of the network. Our investigation (in Table 1) reviews few papers studying multi-commodity transportation which implies potential future research opportunities.
In addition to the topology discussions, the allocation of the spoke nodes to hubs plays a major role in hub location problems. There are different allocation policies of spoke nodes to the located hubs: single, multi-, r-, and hierarchical allocation. In single allocation problems, flow of spoke nodes can be assigned to only one hub, while in multi-allocation problems, flow of spoke nodes is allowed to be assigned to more than one hub node. In r-allocation problems, spoke nodes are allocated to at most r hubs. In hierarchical allocation, the interhub network, connecting only pairs of hubs has two levels. Spoke nodes are allocated to the first level hubs and these hubs are allocated to second level larger hubs.