Bi-objective decision support system for routing and scheduling of hazardous materials

•A new four index formulation to the HVRPTW is presented.•The proposed meta-heuristics algorithm works in a single-step fashion.•Both path choice and routing are dealt using concept of Pareto optimization.•Application of the model to a realistic HVRPTW instance is illustrated.•Algorithms' efficiency to solve complex HVPRTW in reasonable run time is shown.

This paper presents a Pareto-based bi-objective optimization of hazardous materials vehicle routing and scheduling problem with time windows and shows its application to a realistic hazardous material logistics instance. A meta-heuristic solution algorithm is also proposed, which returns a set of routing solutions that approximate the frontier of the Pareto optimal solutions based on total scheduled travel time and total risk of whole transportation process. It works in a single-step fashion simultaneously constructing the vehicle route and selecting the optimal paths connecting the routed locations from a set of non-dominated paths obtained in terms of travel time and risk value.