Strategic and tactical issues in the transportation of freight, hazardous materials and relief-items

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Freight transportation is crucial to modern society because it connects producers to geographically separated consumers thereby ensuring the movement and availability of goods. North America possesses an extensive multimodal transportation infrastructure that are used to move (regular) freight, hazardous materials (hazmat), and relief-item supplies. However, investments in the transportation infrastructure have not kept pace with the increased volume thereby resulting in at or near capacity utilization of the assets, which is further exacerbated by the unavailability of the assets following a random or intentional disruption, and hazmat accident. This research program will propose strategies, design frameworks and develop methodologies to ensure optimal utilization of transportation assets and efficient movement of goods. To this end, three parallel themes would be pursued. Theme 1 of this research program will investigate the strategic and tactical issues that determine the resilience of a rail-truck intermodal transportation system to both random and intentional disruptions, and then propose analytical frameworks and mitigation/recovery strategies to cope with such disruptions. Theme 2 will focus on rail hazmat shipments and will develop novel frameworks and methodologies to mitigate hazmat risk by: employing big data analytics techniques; incentivizing using longer routes; investing in new infrastructure; and, designing more efficient response network. Theme 3 will focus on the transportation of relief-item freight, i.e., humanitarian logistics, and will make use of data analytics to propose the optimal design of the transportation network to facilitate equitable distribution of supplies and efficient evacuation of the impacted population following a disaster event. The proposed research program and the anticipated outcomes is significant for the operations research/transportation domain in three ways: first, develop analytical approaches (i.e., mathematical program and solution methods) and mitigation strategies to cope with random and intentional disruption, and ensure efficient and resilient rail-truck intermodal transportation; second, advance data-driven frameworks and innovative techniques to mitigate risk from rail hazmat shipments; and third, propose methodologies to improve the design and operation of relief-item transportation network. In addition, the insights gained from applying the developments to the Canadian transportation infrastructure will be beneficial to the different stakeholders. For instance, rail intermodal segment will have superior understanding about the optimal location and level of protective resource deployment to minimize the impact of disruption, Transport Canada would have more precise information about hazmat risk across the rail network and the innovative tools to reduce risk, and humanitarian organizations can use the findings to make their network more responsive, efficient and equitable.