A cutting plane approach for bilevel hazardous material transport network design

We consider the network design problem for hazardous material transportation that is modeled as a bilevel multi-commodity network flow model. We study a combinatorial bilevel formulation of the problem and present results on its solution space. We propose a family of valid cuts and incorporate them within an exact cutting plane algorithm. Numerical testing is performed using real as well as random data sets. The results show that the cutting plane method is faster than other methods in the literature on the same formulation. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.