Ant colony system based routing and scheduling for hazardous material transportation

This paper presents a new meta-heuristic algorithm using an ant colony system (ACS) for multi-objective optimisation of hazardous material (HAZMAT) transportation. We focus on the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) aspect of HAZMAT transportation problem. A VRPTW formulation considering multiple attributes in application to HAZMAT transportation is provided. ACS in the proposed algorithm works in the framework of pareto-optimisation for routing and integrates a labelling algorithm for finding non-dominated paths for path choice purpose. Validity of the algorithm has been tested by applying it to several VRPTW benchmark problems. Results show that the proposed algorithm performs quite satisfactorily to the wide variety of VRPTW problems.