Developing a chaotic-simulation based model for ranking high selected network links in hazardous material transportation

Abstract

Hazardous material transportation is one of the main concerns due to the nature of hazardous materials and their incident impacts. In general, transport risk is a main attribute to develop mathematical models for hazardous material routing problem as well as network designing or improving road safety. This paper presents a chaotic-simulation based model to determine the high selected links to improve road network quality for hazardous material transportation, in which risk is considered as a chaotic variable over the network whereas a simulation technique has been applied to cover a wide range of selecting paths. A real road network, consists of fifty-nine nodes and eighty two-way edges, is used for running the mathematical model and checking validation. Due to the large amounts of hazardous material transported by trucks, the proposed methodology is focused on fuel transportation, and high selected list of edges (links) has been obtained to improve road safety. Sensitivity analysis revealed that using different seeds for generating transport risk has no significant effects on finding the most frequent paths and high selected edges. © 2014 Abbas Mahmoudabadi.