Time-dependent location-routing problem for hazmat transportation with stop en route: a case study for fossil fuels distribution

Increased hazmat transportation and its undesirable effects have governments and researchers have special focus on this problem. Various aspects of this field have been studied, and most of them have tried to reduce the total risk, travel time and costs. In this study, we assume stops in the intermediate nodes are allowed because stops en route as a short break may reduce the risk of the trip. The proposed model mainly selects the best facility to assign to customer, finds the optimal route to serve the customers, and determines schedule for arrival and departure time from nodes. Given that the proposed model is NP-hard, a NSGA-II is used to solve it. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the algorithm, a real case of fossil fuels distribution in IRAN is implemented. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm is an efficient algorithm to achieve near-optimal solutions for the medium and large-scale problems.