Decision Support Systems For Dangerous Goods Transportation

Abstract

The management of hazardous substances requires a combination of a large amount of complex technical and scientific facts, as well as subjective values, arbitrary judgement, and fuzzy policy objectives. The increasing size and complexity of activities involving hazardous substances requires higher emphasis on the risk assessment in potentially harmful operations.Furthermore, the transportation of hazardous materials poses a considerable risk to public health and the environment. There are many people involved, all with different kinds of information requirements. The analysis of alternative policies and operational choices for transportation by road, rail, or rivers, given a spatial pattern of production and storage facilities, consumption, environment and population, should be based on a detailed scientific assessment of numerous alternatives, involving technological, environmental, socio-economic and political elements in a comprehensive and directly usable form of risk analysis.This paper describes three information and decision support systems which improve the availability and fast access to relevant data and information, and support the quick and effective generation, display, analysis, evaluation and comparison of different alternatives. Some basic principles and building blocks are also discussed.The systems developed and implemented by IIASA’s Advanced Computer Applications (ACA) project are:• IRIMS, a decision-oriented prototype system for the management of hazardous substances and industrial risk.• A transportation risk assessment system which has been developed for the region Haute Normandie (Prance).• XENVIS, an interactive information and decision support system, applied to problems of industrial risk and hazardous substances management in The Netherlands.Common to all three systems is the integration of databases, modeling, and optimization techniques, the coupling with a geographical information system, as well as the use of symbolic user interfaces and computer graphics, to provide an efficient and convenient framework and information basis for decision making.