Emergency Logistics Management for Hazardous Materials with Demand Uncertainty and Link Unavailability

Abstract

Due to its harmful nature, any incident associated with hazardous material (hazmat) may cause tremendous impacts on the surrounding people and the environment. Focusing on the incident involving this specific type of good, we develop a reliable and robust emergency logistics network that considers both demand uncertainty and possible unavailability of particular links. A time-based risk measure is carefully designed upon the traditional risk assessment to reflect the stakeholder’s sensitivity to risk over response time. The disruption and uncertainty are modeled as two sets of scenarios which are integrated into a bi-objective robust model to evaluate the trade-offs between risk and cost. The effectiveness of the emergency response can be assured by expenditures that add extra capacities to certain links or establish additional facilities that aid recovery from incidents. We apply our model and approach to a real-world network in Guangdong China. Analytical results reveal the necessity of embedding consideration of uncertainty and unreliability into emergency network design problems; outline the importance of hedging against unpredictability by system redundancies; and indicate the impact of stakeholder’s orientation towards cost and risk on the location, allocation, and routing decisions in hazmat emergency response.

Keywords

Emergency response / hazardous materials / robust optimization / link disruption / emergency demand uncertainty

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