An Intermodal Hub-and-Spoke Network Design Problem for Hazardous Materials Incorporating Multiple Stakeholders

Motivated by the lack of research on multimodal transportation for hazardous materials, the fact is that there is an increasing demand for it. The point of origin of this research is hazmat delivery applications arising in transport companies where the stakeholders are responsible for the entire carriage. The stakeholders operate its own fleet on the network and make the crucial decisions on deploying its transport capacity. The aim of the research is to reduce the chance of disaster aroused. by transportation. This research proposes a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints model for the intermodal hub-and-spoke network design (IHSND) with multiple stakeholders. The model incorporates a parametric variational inequality (VI) that formulates the user equilibrium (UE) behavior of intermodal users in route choice for any given network design decision of the network planner. The model is embedded in the conception of equity from the planner's view. A Cross-Entropy (CE) method is employed to solve the model. Finally, the developed model is applied to a case study to demonstrate its applicability and gain managerial insights to some extent. The results are analyzed and suggestions for future research are provided.