Multiobjective Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problem with Time Window Constraints in Hazardous Material Transportation

TLDR: The proposed problem is equivalently transformed into a static multiobjective shortest path problem in an acyclic network reconstructed by the space-time network technique and an efficient dynamic programming method is developed.

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel vehicle routing and scheduling problem in transporting hazardous materials for networks with multiple time-varying attributes. It actually aims to identify all nondominated time-varying paths with departure times at the origin and waiting times at intermediate nodes along these paths for a given pair of origin and destination, subject to three kinds of practical constraints: Limited operational time period, and service, and waiting time window constraints at a node. Based on the assumption of linear waiting attributes at a node, the proposed problem can be equivalently transformed into a static multiobjective shortest path problem in an acyclic network reconstructed by the space-time network technique. An efficient dynamic programming method is then developed. In addition, two numerical examples and a case study are carried out to demonstrate the methodology proposed in this paper.