Route planning for hazardous materials transportation: Multi-criteria decision-making approach

Abstract

Transport of hazardous material (THM) represents a complex area involving a large number of participants. The imperative of THM is minimization of risks in the entire process of transportation from the aspect of everyone involved in it, which is not an easy task at all. To achieve this, it is necessary in its early phase to carry out adequate evaluation and selection of an optimal transport route. In this paper, optimal route criteria for THM are selected using a new approach in the field of multi-criteria decision-making. Weight coefficients of these criteria were determined by applying the Full Consistency Method (FUCOM). Evaluation and selection of hazardous material routes is determined by applying the TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) and the MABAC (Multi-attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison) methods. In order to establish the stability of models and validate the results obtained from the FUCOM-TOPSIS-MABAC model, a sensitivity analysis (of ten different scenarios) was performed. The sensitivity analysis implied changes of the weight coefficients criteria with respect to their original value. The proposed route model was tested on the real example of the transport Eurodiesel in Serbia.