Title: Emergency facilities location optimisation for hazardous materials transportation under the background of counterterrorism

Authors: Changxi Ma; Ruichun He; Fuquan Pan

Addresses: School of Traffic and Transportation, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou, 730070, China ' School of Traffic and Transportation, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou, 730070, China ' School of Automobile and Traffic, Qingdao Technological University, Qingdao, 266520, China

Abstract: Hazardous materials transportation vehicles may become one of the main attack goals under the background of terrorist attacks. This article gives an optimisation method of emergency service facility location for a specific counterterrorism area. Firstly, the multi-objective optimisation model of emergency service facility location is proposed through maximising cover risks, minimising emergency response time, emergency facilities fixed costs and transportation costs. Secondly, the model is solved with an improved genetic algorithm, which use 0-1 encoding method to code chromosome, use roulette with the optimal preservation strategy to conduct choose operation and use adaptive weighted distribution method to assign weight. Finally, a case study with 12 nodes and 21 roads is given to indicate that the optimisation model and algorithm are feasible.

Keywords: improved genetic algorithms; emergency facilities; facility location; optimisation; hazardous materials transportation; multi-objective optimisation; counterterrorism; terrorism; terrorist attacks; emergency services; risks; emergency response time; fixed costs; transport costs; emergency management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSM.2015.071819

International Journal of Computing Science and Mathematics, 2015 Vol.6 No.4, pp.354 - 365

Received: 04 Nov 2014
Accepted: 13 Jan 2015
Published online: 19 Sep 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article