Title: Time-dependent location-routing problem for hazmat transportation with stop en route: a case study for fossil fuels distribution

Authors: Mohammad Javad Jafari; Sadoullah Ebrahimnejad; Misagh Rahbari; Arash Mohamadi

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Islamic Azad University, Shahrood, Iran

Abstract: Increased hazmat transportation and its undesirable effects have governments and researchers have special focus on this problem. Various aspects of this field have been studied, and most of them have tried to reduce the total risk, travel time and costs. In this study, we assume stops in the intermediate nodes are allowed because stops en route as a short break may reduce the risk of the trip. The proposed model mainly selects the best facility to assign to customer, finds the optimal route to serve the customers, and determines schedule for arrival and departure time from nodes. Given that the proposed model is NP-hard, a NSGA-II is used to solve it. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the algorithm, a real case of fossil fuels distribution in IRAN is implemented. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm is an efficient algorithm to achieve near-optimal solutions for the medium and large-scale problems.

Keywords: location problem; vehicle routing problem; hazmat transportation; risk assessment; time-dependent; NSGA II.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSTL.2023.128550

International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics, 2023 Vol.16 No.1/2, pp.54 - 95

Received: 09 Jul 2020
Accepted: 26 Feb 2021
Published online: 26 Jan 2023 *

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