An Integrated Modeling Framework for Routing of Hazardous Materials

We deal with the problem of vehicle routing optimization in the case of transportation of Hazardous Materials (HazMats). This paper introduces a collaborative approach for the HazMat Vehicle Routing Problem (HVRP) by integrating the element of transportation frequencies (as a macro variable) in order to create routing schemes that minimize the overall Cost and Risk factors. This work incorporates several risk and cost models into an innovative software framework which can simulate various decision making scenarios for dynamically formed road networks and can be used by the competent authorities. We include in the objective function under optimization the variance of road usage as an additional parameter to be minimized and we argue on its importance to accommodate traffic balancing on the networks under study. Experimental results verify that our approach outperforms well known methodologies for the case of risk optimization and equally competes for the case of cost optimization.