Bi-objective decision support system for routing and scheduling of hazardous materials

This paper presents a Pareto-based bi-objective optimization of hazardous materials vehicle routing and scheduling problem with time windows and shows its application to a realistic hazardous material logistics instance. A meta-heuristic solution algorithm is also proposed, which returns a set of routing solutions that approximate the frontier of the Pareto optimal solutions based on total scheduled travel time and total risk of whole transportation process. It works in a single-step fashion simultaneously constructing the vehicle route and selecting the optimal paths connecting the routed locations from a set of non-dominated paths obtained in terms of travel time and risk value.