Aiding Route Decision for Hazardous Material Transportation

This research attempts to build a framework for determination of optimal routes for hazardous material transportation. Previous works have suggested incorporation of many conflicting objectives in the analysis, such as travel cost, population exposure, environmental risk or security concerns. Multiplying the number of objectives leads to complex shortest path problems that often have several efficient solutions. The present study puts emphasis on providing an overview of the possible tradeoffs between routes without generating all of them. A simple characterization of the efficient routes is used to select the best ones with no need for any input from the decision-maker. A case study with 8 objective functions has been carried out on a road network in Singapore. A geographical information system (GIS) is used to quantify road link attributes, which are assumed linear and deterministic for the sake of simplicity. The proposed algorithm derives four significantly different routes, which conform to intuition.