Half Open Multi-Depot Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem for Hazardous Materials Transportation

How to reduce the accidents of hazardous materials has become an important and urgent research topic in the safety management of hazardous materials. In this study, we focus on the half open multi-depot heterogeneous vehicle routing problem for hazardous materials transportation. The goal is to determine the vehicle allocation and the optimal route with minimum risk and cost for hazardous materials transportation. A novel transportation risk model is presented considering the variation of vehicle loading, vehicle types, and hazardous materials category. In order to balance the transportation risk and the transportation cost, we propose a bi-objective mixed integer programming model. A hybrid intelligent algorithm is developed based on the epsilon-constraint method and genetic algorithm to obtain the Pareto optimal solutions. Numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Compared with the close multi-depot heterogeneous vehicle routing problem, the average risk and cost obtained by the proposed bi-objective mixed integer programming model can be reduced by 3.99% and 2.01%, respectively. In addition, compared with the half open multi-depot homogeneous vehicle routing problem, the cost is significantly reduced with the acceptable risk.

Automated summary

The study presents a hazardous materials transportation solution for the half open multi-depot heterogeneous vehicle routing problem, aiming to reduce risk and cost through a novel risk model and a bi-objective mixed integer programming model, achieving significantly optimized results.