Designing a road network for hazardous materials shipments

Abstract

We consider the problem of designating hazardous materials routes in and through a major population center. Initially, we restrict our attention to a minimally connected network (a tree) where we can predict accurately the flows on the network. We formulate the tree design problem as an integer programming problem with an objective of minimizing the total transport risk. Such design problems of moderate size can be solved using commercial solvers. We then develop a simple construction heuristic to expand the solution of the tree design problem by adding road segments. Such additions provide carriers with routing choices, which usually increase risks but reduce costs. The heuristic adds paths incrementally, which allows local authorities to trade off risk and cost. We use the road network of the city of Ravenna, Italy, to demonstrate the solution of our integer programming model and our path-addition heuristic. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Developing a Chaotic-Simulation Based Model for Ranking High Selected Network Links in Hazardous Material Transportation

“…One of the most important issues in this area is to find the best path for transporting hazardous materials. Determining the route for hazardous materials, hazmat routing problem, is usually known as a two-sided consideration problem, in which the local authorities are interested in minimizing public risk and transport companies or carriers are concerned about minimizing transport cost [4]. Therefore, a combination of risk and cost is observed in mathematical models as a usual way to find the best path which is not necessarily as the shortest path.…”

“…The specified road network is usually determined by national and/or local authorities to minimize risk for hazardous material transportation [4], and trade-off between effective attributes plays significant roles in finding paths for hazmat transportation. Therefore, using a wide range of dynamic risk factors in hazmat routing problem could be a practical concern on improving road safety measures over a road network.…”

Transportation of hazardous materials (hazmat) a literature survey

“…The objective was minimizing risk while considering the carriers concern about minimizing cost. After Kara and Verter [16], Erkut and Alp [17] proposed an "optimum communication spanning tree problem" to design a network for hazmat shipments. Bianco et al [18] introduced a bi-level network flow model, and Xu et al [15] considered the network design with emergency response together under complex fuzzy environment.…”

Methodological Advances and New Formulations for Bilevel Network Design Problems

“…In (Verter and Kara, 2008), a path-based formulation is proposed for solving the problem more efficiently. Erkut and Alp (2007) propose a method that creates a hazardous material network out of a tree-structured subset of the existing transportation network. This solution is used in a path-addition heuristic.…”