DEVELOPMENT OF A GIS-BASED HAZARDOUS MATERIALS TRANSPORTATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM; A DEMONSTRATION PROJECT

There has been a significant growth in the amount of hazardous materials transported within the U.S. during the past few decades. More than 90% of these shipments are transported by trucks on the nation's highways. During recent years, there has also been a significant increase in the number of accidents involving hazardous materials transportation. This has compelled planners and engineers to address many issues related to the transportation of these materials, including optimizing routes to decrease the risk associated with any accidents. This report presents the development and a simple demonstration of a geographic information system (GIS) based hazardous waste transport system that is intended to reduce the impact of potential incidents regarding hazardous waste shipments through an urban area. The methodology demonstrated in this report uses a probabilistic risk assessment framework, which takes into account the probability of accidents for each road segment and the consequences of an accident, as route selection parameters. The facilities most vulnerable to the impact of accidents, such as schools, hospitals, and day care centers, are considered and should be avoided to the extent practical in the routing of hazardous materials. Vulnerability of the facilities is calculated as a function of the distance of the facilities from the transportation routes and the population of the vulnerable facility. The system uses ArcView 3.2 to perform spatial analyses to assist the optimization procedure. Network Analyst 1.0b, an extension of ArcView GIS, is used as a 'best routing' engine to calculate the safest route for the transportation of hazardous materials. The system is written in Avenue scripting language, which is the built-in object-oriented language for ArcView. The model calculates the risk for each segment, using a simple set of site conditions based on the risk analysis model, and then selects the optimized route for transportation of hazardous materials.