Travel Time Reliability-Based Rescue Resource Scheduling for Accidents Concerning Transport of Dangerous Goods by Rail

The characteristics of railway dangerous goods accidents are very complex. The rescue of railway dangerous goods accidents should consider the timeliness of rescue, the uncertainty of traffic environment and the diversity of rescue resources. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to confront the rescue resources scheduling problem of railway dangerous goods accident by considering factors such as rescue capacity, rescue demand and response time. Based on the analysis of travel time and reliability for rescue route, a multi-objective scheduling model of rescue resources based on travel time reliability is constructed in order to minimize the total arrival time of rescue resources and to maximize total reliability. The proposed model is more reliable than the traditional model due to the consideration of travel time reliability of rescue routes. Moreover, a two-stage algorithm is designed to solve this problem. A multi-path algorithm with bound constraints is used to obtain the set of feasible rescue routes in the first stage, and the NSGA-II algorithm is used to determine the scheduling of rescue resources for each rescue center. Finally, the two-stage algorithm is tested on a regional road network, and the results show that the designed two-stage algorithm is valid for solving the rescue resource scheduling problem of dangerous goods accidents and is able to obtain the rescue resource scheduling scheme in a short period of time.