With the advancement of global industrialization, the market for the transportation of hazardous materials is also expanding, which poses an increasingly serious threat to public safety, environmental protection, and economic stability. This study explores solutions to improve the safety and sustainability of transportation by integrating a variety of transportation modes, such as highways, railways, and waterways. We have built a comprehensive assessment system that takes into account safety considerations, operating costs, and environmental impact. The methodological contributions include an improved NSGA-II algorithm featuring population invasion and homologous competition mechanisms, combined with entropy-weighted TOPSIS for objective route selection. We use the improved NSGA-II algorithm combined with the entropy weighted TOPSIS method to model the solution, screen the optimal scheme, and determine the actual feasible route. We used the real transportation route from Berlin to Paris as a case to verify the validity of the model and proved the improved effect of the algorithm by comparing it with the baseline NSGA-II and MOQPSO. The experimental results demonstrated that the improved algorithm achieved a 133% higher hypervolume than the baseline NSGA-II and 58.8% higher than MOQPSO, while the optimal solution reduced operating costs by approximately 7.3% and carbon emissions by 12.7%. The experimental results proved that the framework effectively reduced the accident rate, operating costs, and carbon emissions. The research results provide important references for logistics planners, fully demonstrating that under the increasingly complex world pattern, it is a feasible plan to improve the efficiency of hazardous materials transportation through multimodal transportation.
Xie et al. (Sun,) studied this question.