Multidepot Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem for a Variety of Hazardous Materials with Risk Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates a multidepot heterogeneous vehicle routing problem for a variety of hazardous materials with risk analysis, which is a practical problem in the actual industrial field. The objective of the problem is to design a series of routes that minimize the total cost composed of transportation cost, risk cost, and overtime work cost. Comprehensive consideration of factors such as transportation costs, multiple depots, heterogeneous vehicles, risks, and multiple accident scenarios is involved in our study. The problem is defined as a mixed integer programming model. A bidirectional tuning heuristic algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm are developed to solve the problem of different scales of instances. Computational results are competitive such that our algorithm can obtain effective results in small-scale instances and show great efficiency in large-scale instances with 70 customers, 30 vehicles, and 3 types of hazardous materials.