A multi-objective model for the hazardous materials transportation problem based on lane reservation

This paper presents an application of the lane reservation strategy in the hazardous materials transportation. Once an accident of hazardous materials transportation happens, its effect is significant. Lane reservation can reduce the hazardous materials transportation risk enormously; however, it will also impact on the normal traffic. The proposed problem is to choose lanes to be reserved on the network and select the path for each hazardous materials shipment among the reserved lanes in order to make a trade-off between the impact on the normal traffic and the total risk of the hazardous materials transportation. We first develop a multi-objective integer linear programming model for the problem with multiple types of hazardous materials and multiple origin-destination pairs. Then we adopt the ε-constraint method to solve the multi-objective model. The performance of the method is evaluated on a large set of randomly generated instances. Computational results show that the ε-constraint method can not only solve the proposed problems within reasonable time but also generate candidate solutions that can shape an efficient Pareto front for the multi-objective optimization problem.