Assessing the impact of floods on a FMCG company’s transport operations and route planning decisions

Abstract

Assessing the impact of floods on the transport system: Flooding is usually associated with uncertainty and disruption regarding the transportation system; therefore, it is important to be able to determine the impacts associated with flood disruptions on the transport system under a business-based analysis. This report presents several literature reviews that have been written around flood disruption, specifically around identifying flood risks, general impacts, transport impacts on several different transport modes, and finally mitigation strategies proposed. A fast-moving consumer goods company in Saudi Arabia was then used as the main part of the analysis, which tackled gaps found in the literature review. Using a shortest path problem solving technique on a wider area, and a travelling salesperson problem solving approach to a more focussed area,, combined with a what-if analysis using a Monte Carlo simulation, it was found that time and distance would both increase during flood disruption, up to 71% time increase and 4% distance increase for the shortest path problem, and a travel time increase of 57% and distance increase up to 34% for the travelling salesperson problem. Consequently, these time and distance increases induced by flood disruption would impact the ideal travel paths and customer sequences every time a new flood scenario was created by the simulation, it also increased the environmentally harmful gas emission, with the shortest path results recording emissions up to 5.96962154 Kg of CO2 per trip per vehicle, and the travelling salesperson results recording emissions up to 15.1619057 Kg of CO2 per trip per vehicle, furthermore, fuel costs per litres required have also increased naturally with the higher fuel requirements. Essentially, uncertainty from flood disruptions will result in negative operational impacts on the business and the environment, thus, it is important to highlight strong road links and vulnerable links in order to incorporate them under the long-term planning for flood disruption management, communicating the risks with customers and staff is also important to avoid potential delays and misunderstandings, creating water retention areas along vulnerable links may be a short term strategy, and finally, development of roads and redevelopment of existing roads can be a long term strategy.