Multi-objective hazardous materials routing and scheduling for balancing safety and travel time

Abstract

This research develops a new multi-objective multi-period optimisation model to find optimal links and routes to maintain a balance between safe and fast distribution of hazmats between origins and destinations through the transport network. The transport network includes multiple origins and destinations along with multiple hazmat classes to better mimic the challenges faced by practitioners. We consider unknown probabilities for hazmat incidents along with a game-theoretic demon approach and formulate a link-based routing and scheduling hazmat shipment problem. The objective functions are defined to minimise both the probability of population exposure affected by hazmat transport risks and the total transportation time in the distribution network. This paper also proposes a solution method based on an integrated Monte Carlo simulation and fuzzy goal programming to obtain Pareto-optimal solutions. A numerical example is provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed mathematical model and the solution method in obtaining Pareto-optimal solutions.