A novel optimization method for hazardous materials vehicle routing with temperature-based time windows

As a concrete achievement of sharing economy, sharing intermediate bulk containers (IBCs) have emerged and developed in recent years. Meanwhile, high temperature is one of the essential factors in routing optimal problems for vehicles with hazardous material (hazmat). Therefore, to address the above issue, a variant of the hazmat vehicle routing problem of sharing IBCs is proposed. Correspondingly, a mixed non-linear integer programming model is refined considering temperature-based time windows. Specifically, the given problem is solved by using a novel adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) algorithm. The main innovation points are as follows. Firstly, temperature-based time windows are quantified and integrated into the proposed hazmat vehicle routing optimal model. Secondly, novel heuristic operators are introduced in the ALNS algorithm. Finally, 18 numerical examples for the Solomon set demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is suitable to solve this kind of hazmat vehicle routing optimal problem.