(412a) Chemical Transportation Network Optimization Under Extreme Weather Conditions

Chemical transportation is a segment with special risks during the whole life cycle of chemical processing. It often deals with toxic or hazardous chemicals, which presents a high potential of dangerous accidents such as explosion or toxic gas leakage. Therefore high attention should be paid to the design of transportation route in order to reduce the potential risk to the environment and densely populated areas. The previous studies have put focus on the optimization between population distribution, roadway safety and traffic congestion to give the recommendation. The requirement of chemical transportation route has already been included in the national wide or regional wide regulations for the safety management and emergency response. Despite this progress, many serious events have occurred during chemical transportation and have made severe impacts on environment. One major reason to aggravate its affect on the environment is the meteorological change. Therefore, the optimized route to cope with different weather condition is of great significance to all stake holders.

In this study, a methodology is developed for risk assessment and dynamic optimization for the transportation of chemicals and evaluation in the situations of weather condition change. In such case, the coincidence of heavy raining and passing through the bridge will add the risk to cause chemical release into the downstream of the river. The difference in the atmosphere stability will also have different pollutant dispersion in the surrounding area. The whole problem is set into a grid network. Afterwards, geographic and meteorological parameters have been assigned and a MINLP model will be set up to achieve the minimal potential impact of environment and populated zones.