A risk assessment for road transportation of dangerous goods: a routing solution

Improve road traffic safety is one of the most important objectives for transport policy makers in contemporary society, and represents a strategic issue for enhance life quality. Recently ISO 39001 (Road Traffic Safety Management Systems) introduced the guidelines of safety-based activities aimed to decreasing road accidents, in agreement with the Quality Management Systems (ISO 9000). Such guidelines are intended for infrastructure managers, administrators, and private entities, and defines a standard management for reduction of road risk. In this context, the risk arising by dangerous goods transport represents a particular threat which needs strategies and tools to reduce risk rate of society, property and environment. Several decision making solutions for transport managers and public administration are defined, but two open points still exist. Firstly, there are not applications supporting for dangerous goods carriers in tactical and operational planning. The second point is related to impacts of traffic congestion on road accidents frequency: there is not a common approach for study and assessment these relationships. The aim of this paper is to analyze the interactions between road traffic flow and frequency of accidents: the paper propose an integrated approach for the study of routing problems considering safety. The first part concerns a brief critical review on literature solutions. Following is presented a new approach to analyze a road accident involving a dangerous goods, focusing on the reason which lead to a leakage of hazardous materials. This paper presents an upgrade of a minimum cost routing problem for a road carrier considering also the risk related to dangerous goods. After a description on how computing risk concerning dangerous goods transportation in a routing choice problem, the paper describes a solution aimed at providing a tactical and operating decision-making tool. The aim is to enable the carrier that transport dangerous goods to calculate the quantification of the risk for each specific trip in addition to operating cost for each specific transport. The added value of risk quantification could be used by transportation carrier in ISO 39001 to numerically prove his own safety-decisions to the control authority. The analysis developed has provided good results. The approach defined, albeit simplified, is a useful tool, especially when ISO 39001 standards will strengthen road safety. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.