Transportation of Hazardous Materials: Management, Coordination, and Optimization

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Often transported in large volumes, hazardous materials (hazmat) shipments are always associated with substantial levels of risks, due to the potential threats and damage to people, property, and environment. The recent Lac-Mégantic train derailment further drew the world's attention to the safety of hazmat transportation. In the proposed research program, three themes of studies will be conducted to address the management, coordination, and optimization of the hazmat transportation, so that the system risk can be significantly mitigated. Theme 1: Bilevel Optimization Models for Controlling the Risk Equity of Hazmat Transportation. Bilevel models recognize the dominant relationships between the participants. More specifically, the upper and lower levels respectively represent the optimization problems of the government and the hazmat carrier. From the perspective of the government, the major concern is to maintain the equity of the spatial distribution of risk, because of the strong public opposition and possible increased severity of exposure levels caused by overloading. The carrier, on the other hand, tries to find the optimal routing and scheduling plan for the hazmat shipments. Theme 2: Managing Hazmat Transportation Networks with Stochastic Elements. Uncertainties prevail everywhere. Particularly in transportation, facility processes, travel times, and incident probabilities are all stochastic in nature. When the distributions of these activities vary with the time of day, a more complicated situation arises, which necessitates an in-depth examination of time-dependent stochastic systems. The study will focus on the intermodal networks, starting from the time-invariant case to adaptive time-variant case. The anticipated high computational complexity will require the development of practical solution procedures to find near-optimal solutions in a reasonable time. Theme 3: Adaptive Decision Support Systems (ADSS) for Post-Event Routing Decisions. Because of the inherent risks, it is crucial to ensure that the hazmat transportation system can effectively and efficiently react to changing conditions, such as extreme weather conditions, traffic accidents, and terrorist attacks. Based on the paradigm of big data, optimization models will be designed to assist post-event routing decisions, where both the risk and cost will be evaluated. The ADSS can be used to assess the flexibility of existing networks and improve the responsiveness of the networks to unexpected events. The main purpose of this research program is to gain a better understanding of the existing networks, and to facilitate relevant shareholders to manage the hazmat transportation. The real world data based analyses will provide the transportation industry, such as the Canadian National Railway, the Canadian Pacific Railway, and oil and gas companies, with invaluable insights into improving safety.