Designing emergency response networks for hazardous materials transportation

Undesirable consequences of dangerous goods incidents can be mitigated by quick arrival of specialized response teams at the accident site. We present a novel methodology to determine the optimal design of a specialized team network so as to maximize its ability to respond to such incidents in a region. We show that this problem can be represented via a maximal arc-covering model. We discuss two formulations for the maximal arc-covering problem, a known one and a new one. Through computational experiments, we establish that the known formulation has excessive computational requirements for large-scale problems, whereas the alternative model constitutes a basis for an efficient heuristic. The methodology is applied to assess the emergency response capability to transport incidents, that involve gasoline, in Quebec and Ontario. We point out the possibility of a significant improvement via relocation of the existing specialized teams, which are currently stationed at the shipment origins. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.