Scheduling hazardous material shipments

摘要

During the last years the analysis of the risks in transporting hazardous materials has completed remarkable steps ahead and begins to be an useful instrument of appraisal. This paper proposes an approach for the minimization of the risk based on the planning of the carriers schedule. In particular, the information coming from territorial databases make available the lowest risk routes according to opportune functions that hold account, simultaneously, of the risk factors for the carrier itself, for the surrounding areas and the respective populations and of the economic efficient characteristics of the transport (lengths and times). This allow us to represent a carrier scheduling problem as a graph optimization problem and to propose some fast heuristic algorithms, suitable for real time implementations. Finally, through the development of an appropriate software we have carried out many performance verifications and estimated the results.