Toll Policies for Mitigating Hazardous Materials Transport Risk

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate toll setting as a policy tool to regulate the use of roads for dangerous goods shipments. We propose a mathematical formulation as well as a solution method for the hazardous materials toll problem. Based on a comparative analysis of proposed mathematical models, we show that toll policies can be more effective than the popular network design policies that identify road segments to be closed for vehicles carrying hazardous materials. We present a summary of computational experiments on a problem instance from Western Ontario, Canada.

Methodological Advances and New Formulations for Bilevel Network Design Problems

“…Kara and Verter, 2004) or by introducing tolls for the transportation of dangerous goods (e.g. Marcotte et al, 2009). The followers are the carriers who need to ship their demand through the network.…”

Generalized route planning model for hazardous material transportation with VaR and equity considerations

“…Recently researchers have focussed on other considerations like transportation cost or risk equity dispersion [17]. Some bi-level hazmat transportation models have been developed to study the trade-off between the two conflicting objectives of minimizing transportation cost and risk of the hazmat transport [23,30,40]. Another recent direction of study is on building a model which has less reliance on the accuracy of historical accident data.…”

“…Many models have been created, with objectives to minimize the expected risk [4,20], maximum risk [14], and the mean-variance of the risk [14]. There are some other models that consider balancing hazmat risk and transportation cost [30,40]. A common characteristic of all of these approaches is that they rely on hazmat accident statistics being available and accurate.…”

Dual Toll Pricing for Hazardous Materials Transport with Linear Delay

“…In USA, in 1998, there were roughly 15,000 accidents related the necessity of a more flexible restriction policy of hazmat shipments. Recently, an alternative policy tool, toll-setting policies (TS), was proposed by Marcotte et al (2009) to deter (but not prevent) hazmat carriers from using certain road segments via toll-pricing. An example given in Marcotte et al (2009) is helpful to understand that TS policy is a more flexible regulation tool for hazmat than ND policy, and ND policy may be infeasible in certain cases.…”