Hazardous materials transportation

This chapter describes how the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT) defines a hazardous material as any substance or material capable of causing harm to people, property, and the environment. Dependence on hazardous materials is a fact of life in industrialized societies. There are thousands of different hazardous materials in use today. The United Nations sorts hazardous materials into nine classes according to their physical, chemical, and nuclear properties: explosives and pyrotechnics; gases; flammable and combustible liquids; flammable, combustible, and dangerous-when-wet solids; oxidizers and organic peroxides; poisonous and infectious materials; radioactive materials; corrosive materials; and miscellaneous dangerous goods, such as hazardous wastes. This first section of the chapter describes how the transportation of hazmats can be classified according to the mode of transport, namely; road, rail, water, air, and pipeline. The next section offers a high-level view of hazmat logistics literature. Section 3 contains a treatment of risk, the main ingredient of hazmat logistics problems that separate them from other logistics problems and section 4 deals with hazmat routing and scheduling problems. Section 5 focuses on models that combine undesirable facility location and hazmat transportation. The final section offers a critique of the existing literature and suggests directions for future research.