New detailed numerical procedures for calculating risk measures in hazardous materials transportation

Historical evidence has shown that accidents due to hazardous material rele ases during transportation can lead to consequences as heavy as those creat ed by releases occurring at fixed plants and therefore quantified risk anal ysis has to be performed for transportation networks too. The calculation o f risk measures, like individual and societal risk, due to transportation n etworks has considerable complexity and needs a great computational effort. For this application two new detailed procedures, named TRANSIN and TRANSS OC, for the evaluation of individual and societal risk, have been introduce d, which can take into account, at the same time, different transportation modes, hazardous materials, meteorological conditions and seasonal situatio ns, a non uniform wind probability density distribution and an accurate des cription of the indoor and outdoor population both on-route and off-route. In this paper, firstly, the arrangement of the input data is explained, and then the fundamentals of the methodology are described, often focusing att ention on mathematical ways to perform operations saving accuracy without i ncreasing calculation time. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reser ved.