High-HAZARDOUS materials TRANSPORTATION can be extremely harmful to the environment and human health upon the occurrence of accidents. Contacts with these materials can cause damage and even death to human lives and animals. HAZARDOUS materials include explosives, gases, flammable liquids and solids, along with oxidizing SUBSTANCES, poisonous, and radioactive materials and any other dangerous substance. When these SUBSTANCES are moved on the roads, special precautionary measures should have been taken.In this article, the framework of risk evaluation and modeling has been discussed, and then this framework is used to make a mathematical model for finding the optimum path for transporting the HAZARDOUS materials. Finally a risk oriented optimization algorithm is developed for solving the mathematical model.

Risk factors are generally defined and assigned to road networks, as constant measures in hazmat routing problems. In fact, they may be dynamic variables depending on traffic volume, weather and road condition, and drivers’ behavior.In this research work, risk factors are defined as dynamic variables using the concept of chaos theory. The largest Lyapunov exponent is utilized to determine the presence of chaos for road accident rates. Risk factors with the property of chaotic behavior are considered to solve hazmat routing problem using a developed mathematical model. Evaluation process has been done based on travel distance which mainly represents travel cost, as well as results show that the application of chaos to define dynamic risk factor is an appropriate method to solve hazmat routing problem, comparing to constant measures of risks.

In this paper, the optimal routing problem for TRANSPORTATION of HAZARDOUS materials is studied. Routing for the purpose of reducing the risk of TRANSPORTATION of HAZARDOUS materials has been studied and formulated by many researchers and several routing models have been presented up to now. These models can be classified into two categories: the models for routing a single movement and the models for routing multiple movements. In this paper, according to the current rules and regulations of road TRANSPORTATION of HAZARDOUS materials in Iran, a routing problem is designed. In this problem, the routes for several independent movements are simultaneously determined. To examine the model, the problem of TRANSPORTATION of two different dangerous materials in the road network of Mazandaran province in the north of Iran is formulated and solved by applying Integer programming model.    

A risk assessment study was conducted to predict the expected HAZARDOUS influence on the ecosystem resulted from urbanization and industrialization activities at Helwan area, Egypt. To achieve these goals, soils, plants and water samples were collected from Helwan area, and their total concentrations of inorganic contaminants (Cd, Cr, Co, Cu, Fe, Mn, Ni, Pb, and Zn) and organic pollutants; such as Phenol and hydrocarbons were measured. The obtained results showed that, the concentrations of organic contaminants in water streams and surrounding soils recorded high concentration values than the permissible limits, while inorganic elements were within the safe limits for irrigation. In addition, soils irrigated with the effluents of industrial units recorded high values of inorganic and organic contaminants. Consequently, the levels of these contaminants were high in plant tissues grown thereon; especially the edible parts. Risk assessment based on available predicted no effect concentration values for the aquatic and terrestrial environment was performed. Inorganic elements were expected to cause serious hazard problems for both aquatic organisms and soil microorganisms. The impact of these pollutants on human health was calculated using daily metals intake of inorganic metals via consumption of edible plants. Hazard index values proved that concentrations of Cr may cause serious hazard problems for humans in this area; especially, children.

The shipments of HAZARDOUS materials (HAZMATs) induce various risks to the road network. Today, one of the major considerations of TRANSPORTATION system managers is HAZMATs shipments, due to the increasing demand of these goods (because it is more used in industry, agriculture, medicine, etc.), and the rising number of incidents that are associated to HAZARDOUS materials.This paper presents a tool for HAZMATs TRANSPORTATION authorities and planners that would reduce the risk of the road network by identifying safe and economic routes for HM transshipment. Using the proposed linear integer programming model, the HM management system could determine an optimal assignment for all origin-destination pairs for various HAZARDOUS materials in a TRANSPORTATION network and so reduce the vulnerability due to HAZMATs releases such as population and environmental vulnerability. The model is implemented and evaluated for the HAZARDOUS materials routing within Fars, Yazd, Isfahan, and Chaharmaha-o-Bakhtiyari provinces of Iran. The branch and- bound algorithm is applied to solve the model using the Lingo software package.

TRANSPORTATION of HAZARDOUS materials is the area that is very important due to the high potential of possible incidents, despite high safety statistics. Determining indicator and assessment of HAZARDOUS materials’ risk, is the first step t execute route direction projects and also, a way to plan and assess function of road network. Here, in this article, we suggest a method to determine the risk to transport HAZARDOUS materials from arc of a network, using questionarie date and process to hierarchy assessment. The results of this study show that routes of shiraz-Nourabad. Sepidan, kazeroun-Dashte arzan, and Qotb.abad-Fath. abad, have the most risk and route of Arsanjan-jamal.abad has the least risk to pass inflammable fluid. Also, the routes of Dashte arzan-Qaemieh, Kazeroun-Dashte arzan, and Marvdasht-Shiraz have the most risk and route of Khosvieh-Hajiabad has the least risk to pass HAZARDOUS materials.

The researches on environmental and sustainability are an active topic, especially in the waste management. As such, the HAZARDOUS waste optimization is an active research topic in developing countries which may be integrated with carbon emissions and green subjects. This grand challenge motivates the current research to contribute a new multi-objective optimization model to address the green HAZARDOUS waste location-routing problem. The proposed multi-objective optimization model establishes four objectives simultaneously for the first time. In addition to the total cost and the greenhouse gas emissions of the TRANSPORTATION systems as the two main objectives, another objective function aims to minimize the risk of TRANSPORTATION of the HAZARDOUS waste alongside the waste residue associated with the people’s exposure around TRANSPORTATION paths. Furthermore, the total risk linked with the population in a certain radius around the treatment and disposal centers is minimized. As the proposed model is complex with conflicting objectives, several multi-objective decision making (MODM) tools are employed and compared with each other based on different test problems associated with an industrial example. Based on the solution quality and the computational time, the technique for the order of preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) is selected as the strongest technique to assess the performances of all five MODM methodologies.

TRANSPORTATION of HAZARDOUS materials plays a significant role in economic activities in developing as well as developed countries because of the need of industrial plants to these materials. In many cases, production plants of HAZARDOUS materials are far from the consumers, where TRANSPORTATION of materials affects the safety of the people involved. In this paper, besides minimizing the cost of related TRANSPORTATION, reduction of accident probability as minimizing the risk of HAZARDOUS materials TRANSPORTATION, is also considered. The importance of required time for materials delivery is another main objective. The above issue is categorized in a vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). In this paper, a new multi-objective mathematical model is presented and solved by the use of a well-known evolutionary algorithm, NSGA-II. Related computational results are compared by results of Lingo software using the e-constraint method in small-sized test problems. A number of numerical investigations to evaluate the quality of solution sets versus time in large sizes are performed on various test instances. Results obtained by NSGA-II were compared based on two comparison metrics, namely spacing and quantity, in order to show the efficiency of the proposed NSGA-II. Finally, a real-case study was considered for shipping the Chlorine gas capsules from the Water & Wastewater Company to municipal water treatment facilities in Tehran.