Abstract
Unlike widely available literatures in hazardous material (HAZMAT) transportation that basically aim at finding non dominated paths for a given origin-destination pair, our main focus in this study is on vehicle routing problem with time window (VRPTW) aspect of HAZMAT transportation problem that has received very less attention in literatures. We present a new multi-objective optimization model and its meta-heuristic solution technique using Ant Colony System for HAZMAT routing. In contrast to existing local routing models, we consider minimization of risk and transportation cost in both route choice and routing phases of transportation process. Moreover, route choice and routing have been carried out as a single step process. Lastly, the proposed algorithm has been tested for normal VRPTW by testing on Solomon benchmark instances and the results obtained show that the proposed algorithm outperforms while maintaining realistic computation time.
