European hub location problem for China Railway Express in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative

Freight trains between Europe and China (China Railway Express) are a central component of the Belt and Road Initiative. In recent years, the service has experienced significant growth, however operational problems still remain. Seeking a solution, this paper used a hierarchical spatial aggregation process based on EU transportation policy to identify 87 origin nodes. Distance-based weighted centrality measures and a TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) model ranked node centrality in European rail, road, and waterway networks. The 10 highest-ranking nodes served as candidate hubs for the mixed-integer linear programme, which considered time-definite, multimodal transportation and penalised partially vacant trains. Berlin, Budapest, Duisburg and Lille were chosen as optimal hub locations.