Research In The Routing And Location Problems Of Hazardous Materials Transport

Recently, industry as a pillar of the Chinese national economy, has been developed quickly. There are many hazardous materials have been used during industrial production, and the types and the quantities of the hazardous material are becoming more and more. Hazardous material has many properties such as toxic, flammable, and be harmed to human and environment. Hazardous material may caused accident in the link of production, use, transport, storage, disposal and other sectors. Hazardous material accident has the characteristics of low probability and great harm. Once an accident happens, it will produced huge losses to the country and the people. Hazardous material from the process of production areas to the use areas, has to go through the transport links. Therefore, studying on the transportation of the hazardous material is especially important.In this article, on the basis of understanding the transportation of the hazardous material, we give the measures of risk and cost in the transportation of hazardous material firstly. During the measure of risk, we take the accident probability and the area of impact in the hazardous material transportation into consideration.Secondly, we consider the models of transportation of the hazardous material and solutions. The common models and solutions are reviewed.Thirdly, a highway transportation model and a highway-railway intermodal transportation model are proposed. For each transportation model, a multi-origin, multi-destination and multi-variety hazardous materials transportation network has been considered. Ant colony algorithm has been applied to solve this two transportation models. Comparison and analysis between this two transportation modes has been done in order to know which model is better.Fourthly, we propose a two-level emergency facility location model with considering time robust. As we know vehicle travel time is affected by weather, road conditions and other factors, so it is changing constantly. The new model considers the effect of time on the location problem, and makes the time robust optimization. We use the simulated annealing algorithm to solve the model and make a case study.Finally, we make a summary of the whole paper and give out the directions of future research.