Multimodal Location and Routing Model for Hazardous Materials Transportation

Transporting hazardous materials (HAZMAT) often involves multiple modes, especially for long-distance transportation. Based on the recent US Commodity Flow Survey data, the amount of HAZMAT transported by multiple modes has increased from 18.7 million tons in 2002 to 111.0 million tons in 2007. However, not much research has been conducted on multimodal HAZMAT transportation. Most existing studies focus exclusively on single-mode (either highway or railway) HAZMAT transportation, investigating topics such as vehicle routing and scheduling, network design, facility location, and risk analysis. Motivated by the lack of research on multimodal HAZMAT transportation and the fact that there is an increasing demand for it, this research proposes a multimodal HAZMAT model that simultaneously optimizes the locations of transfer yards and transportation routes. The developed model is applied to two case studies of different network sizes to demonstrate its applicability. The results are analyzed and suggestions on future research are provided.