Locating Emergency Response Facilities for Hazardous Materials Transportation with Probabilistic Response Time

This paper studies the emergency response facility location problem. It is assumed that the demand of a roadway segment is concentrated on its midpoint and the number of the emergency response facilities and candidate location sites are known. An optimization model considering the uncertain coverage probability and rescue effect for emergency response facility location and network design is developed. The objective is to maximize the total expected demand node covered, with the decisions being where to locate the response facilities and how to dispatch emergency response teams to demand nodes. A genetic algorithm is designed to solve the model, and the application of the model shows that the optimization model can improve the robustness of the emergency response facility location by considering coverage probability and rescue effect.