As highway accidents amount to almost 90% of the serious incidents arising in handling of hazardous materials, routing of trucks carrying hazardous materials has become an interest among many stakeholders such as government agencies, shippers, carriers, and insurance companies. In the hazardous materials routing, there are two major goals, which are conflicting: mitigation of risk along the route and minimization of transportation cost.
We propose a goal programming-based approach to optimally trading off between the risk and the cost of transporting a specific shipment of hazardous materials from a source to a destination in a network. The risk of a route depends on accident rates, population exposure, and traversing time of arcs and nodes along the route, whereas the cost is mainly determined by the time to complete the route. The unique contributions of the proposed model are (1) risk at nodes on the route is explicitly taken into optimization and (2) time-varying travel speeds along arcs and through nodes are assumed.