A Metaheuristic Approach for Hazardous Materials Transportation

The transportation of hazardous materials is a growing problem due to the increasing transported volumes. What differentiates hazardous material shipments from shipments of other materials is the risk associated with an accidental release of hazardous materials during transportation. A possible solution to reduce the occurrence of dangerous events is to provide travel plans that establish a fair spatial and temporal distribution of the risk. The objective of this work is to study the problem of routing and scheduling a set of hazardous materials shipments, minimizing the travel total risk while spreading the risk among different zones of the geographical region where the transportation network is defined. We propose a genetic algorithm that, given a set of dissimilar routes for every origin-destination pair, selects a route and defines a departure time for every shipment with the aim of minimizing the total risk of the travel plans. The genetic algorithm is experimentally evaluated on a set of realistic scenarios defined on a regional area.