Development of a Mathematical Model for a Fuel Routing Problem Under a Fuzzy Condition– A Case Study

Hazmat (i.e., hazardous material) transportation makes concerns about harm to human and environmental safety, therefore risk is considered as a main issue in all stage of hazmat shipment. In this paper, a bi-criteria algorithm is developed to consider risk and cost for the hazmat shipment. The main objective is to find the best path for carrying hazardous material form origin nodes of suppliers to destination nodes of fuel stations. Risk is identified by three groups of road accidents, population and environment. Due to a lack of exact data on three components of defined risk, linguistic variables are identified to achieve road safety experts' view of points by questionnaires. In this case, triangular fuzzy numbers are used to convert linguistic variables to crisp values. The road network of Mazandaran province is nominated as a case study consisting of 62 nodes and 81 edges. The validation process is carried out regarding to different amounts of risk and cost priorities and the associated results are discussed. It is concluded that the decision makers are able to consider their concerns on the fuel routing problem using different priorities of risk and cost simultaneously.