Optimal Handling of Hazardous Freights in Distributed Supply Chains

The developments of telecommunication and intelligent transportation technologies have led to an increase in the safety level of freight transportation and have enabled making the routing decisions based on real-time information and an updated condition of the network, the suppliers, and the receivers. This paper proposes a dynamic decentralized optimization case, in which the network of freight distribution, presented as a distributed Supply Chain (DSC), expands or changes temporally. The proposed optimization problem should be solved repeatedly on a rolling horizon basis which enables optimizing a certain time period in advance. At each step, the problem is modeled using discrete event systems (DESs) and a transportation model is proposed for transferring freights between any two nodes of the supply chain. This model supports the decision making process for routing and scheduling of delivery shipments that arrive dynamically at a supplier, which is of major importance and directly affects the performance of a freight distribution system.