Designing a hazardous materials transportation network by a bi-level programming based on toll policies

Hazardous materials (HAZMAT) are common in industry and agriculture, playing important roles in the development of society and economy. Meanwhile, in actual operation processes, because of the long distances between the producers and supply regions of HAZMAT, a mass of HAZMAT are always being transported, which bring risk within the corresponding areas. This study aims to design a feasible and practical HAZMAT transportation network, where the risk leading to incidents is mitigated. Adopting the congestion pricing principles for reference, link tolls are taken as the decision variables, and a bi-level programming optimization model with a variation inequality is established to interpret the problem. Moreover, a double-temperature simulated annealing algorithm inserted with a diagonalization algorithm is proposed to solve the model, and necessary computational experiments are executed. The calculated results and sensitivity analyses show that the newly proposed method is effective, which is able to be rational decision reference for relevant departments. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.