Modeling urban hazmat transportation with road closure consideration

Hazardous materials accidents during road transport have caused catastrophic losses to humans and the environment all over the world in recent years. Especially in an urban environment, heavy traffic congestion and road closures present serious and complex situations during hazmat transportation. The challenge of urban hazmat transportation is to determine the vehicle routes that minimize risk subject to cost considerations and road closures. This paper presents a bi-objective programming model and a heuristic algorithm to optimize the routing of hazardous materials transportation with road closure considerations. A model is formulated that minimizes hazmat risk and transportation cost subject to road closure constraints. A new heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the bi-objective hazmat vehicle routing and it is applied to a realistic case study involving hazmat transportation in the highly populated metropolitan area of Shanghai, China.