Title: A bi-level programming problem for transporting hazardous materials with a bi-modal transportation network

Authors: Akbar Ketabi; Abdolsalam Ghaderi; Anwar Mahmoodi

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran

Abstract: This paper investigates a hazardous materials network design problem through a bi-modal transportation network consisting of road and rail. Due to the different concerns of the government and carriers in transportation of these materials, we propose a bi-level formulation for the considered problem. The government in the upper level seeks to a fair distribution of risk by minimising the maximum network risk. On the other hand, the carrier in the lower level aims to minimise the transportation cost. The bi-level problem is transformed into a single-level mixed-integer programming problem by replacing the lower-level by Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. We also propose a heuristic algorithm, which can find appropriate solutions to the realistic size problem with acceptable computation time. Our analysis of solving two case studies including Iranian multimodal network indicates that the algorithm finds acceptable solutions with reasonable computation time.

Keywords: hazardous material; bi-level optimisation; bi-modal network design; heuristic algorithm; risk equilibration.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSTL.2022.126937

International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics, 2022 Vol.15 No.3/4, pp.355 - 381

Received: 09 Jul 2020
Accepted: 26 Sep 2021
Published online: 14 Nov 2022 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article