Variable neighborhood search to solve the vehicle routing problem for hazardous materials transportation

This work focuses on the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing problem (HFVRP) in the context of hazardous materials (HazMat) transportation. The objective is to determine a set of routes that minimizes the total expected routing risk. This is a nonlinear function, and it depends on the vehicle load a...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Bula, G., Prodhon, C., González, F., Afsar, H.M., Velasco, N.
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2017
Country:Colombia
Institution:Universidad de los Andes
Repository:Séneca: repositorio Uniandes
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uniandes.edu.co:1992/46986
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1992/46986
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304389416310196
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Transportation risk assessment
Heterogeneous vehicle routing problem
Variable neighborhood search
Description
Summary:This work focuses on the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing problem (HFVRP) in the context of hazardous materials (HazMat) transportation. The objective is to determine a set of routes that minimizes the total expected routing risk. This is a nonlinear function, and it depends on the vehicle load and the population exposed when an incident occurs. Thus, a piecewise linear approximation is used to estimate it. For solving the problem, a variant of the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) algorithm is employed. To improve its performance, a post-optimization procedure is implemented via a Set Partitioning (SP) problem. The SP is solved on a pool of routes obtained from executions of the local search procedure embedded on the VNS. The algorithm is tested on two sets of HFVRP instances based on literature with up to 100 nodes, these instances are modified to include vehicle and arc risk parameters. The results are competitive in terms of computational efficiency and quality attested by a comparison with Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) previously proposed.