CATASTROPHE AVERSE STRATEGIES FOR ROUTING AND SITING IN THE DISPOSAL OF HAZARDOUS MATERIALS

Abstract

This study provides a method for quantitative analysis of a shipment planning of hazardous materials (hazmats). We first formulate a hazmat routing problem as a maximin problem: the assignment of hazmat vehicles is determined so as to minimize the expected consequence; the incident probabilities on each link are chosen so as to maximize the expected consequence, reflecting catastrophe avoidance of the dispatcher. Our analysis then reveals that the maximin problem reduces to a single-level convex programming problem, which shares a common mathematical structure with a logit-type stochastic user equilibrium problem that is well known in the field of transportation science. This enables us to develop a globally convergent algorithm for obtaining the optimal mixed route strategy, which can be effectively applied to real world large-scale networks.