Risk of Traffic Incident Delay in Routing and Scheduling of Hazardous Materials

Abstract

Unlike normal traffic incidents, incidents involving hazardous material are associated with significant traffic delays. The model of the hazardous material routing and scheduling problem presented in this paper considers such potential effect of a hazardous material incident, in addition to the traditionally considered risk to exposed population. Probable loss due to congestion created by the probable incident is used as its measure. The objective is to minimize sum of the population-based and congestion-based risk cost. The model was used to explore routing and scheduling in an ITS data-based hazardous material logistics instance derived from the road network of Osaka City, Japan. Comparison of the results showed that the model provides a better alternative to the conventional population-based model as it gives balanced optimal solution avoiding paths that causes large increase of the congestion-based cost. 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York.