Research On Hub And Spoke Network Theory And Its Application

With the development of network economics, network has become the basis of social and economic system, become the main factor of economic development of the country and the main source of competivities advantage of the company. AS a special type network, hub and spoke network attracts much attention from enterpriser and researcher, since it was adopted by airline industry. Hub and spoke network application has extended from airline industry, maritime transport industry, computer industry to logistics, financial, and travel industry. Research work is also extended from traditional geography, operational research to management science, economics, and so on. Although we have got many research results, but there also have many problems need to be research, such as formative mechanism, operation policy and hubbing index. The objective of this research is to investigate and characterize the hub and spoke , to designs a theory system about hub and spoke network as the theory basic and practice direction of our country's industry development, infrastructure planning and company expandation.The dissertation integrates math, management science, economics and computer science theory, Research method includes theory research and demonstration analysis method, qualitative analysis and quantitative computation method. The dissertation studies the following research works, the first part is about network formative mechanism, the second part extends the design model of hub and spoke, In part III, the work studies the operation policy of hub network system, including cost allocation, service policy choice and collaborate policy, part VI is about network characteristic appraisement, the last part is about application research.After above research work, the research work's main contribution including: (1) Found the key factor of the formation of hub and spoke network, (2) Extend the design model, provide variable cost flow discount model and competition hub location model, (3) Combination cooperation game theory, yield compare theory, value chain theory and user choice theory with hub and spoke theory, to research cost allocation, service policy choice, and cooperation policy design. (4) Found the scale rich charactics of complexnetwork which combined multi- hub and spoke network (5) extend the hub and spoke network application to disaster logistics network planning.This research contributes to our understanding of fundamental questions about the merits of hub and spoke networks and is useful in directing Chinese company's operation under network market condition.