Transportation of hazardous materials

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Hazardous Materials (hazmats) are an integral part of any developed society.  There are 74,000 daily shipments of hazmats in Canada and 800,000 in the United States.  Although these are the aggregate numbers for all modes of transportation, roughly 90% of the shipments are moved by trucks and trains in both the countries.  In Canada the quantum moved by trains is rather comparable to that moved by trucks, but an overwhelming amount of research on hazmats focused on highway shipments.  Motivated by this I developed a risk assessment methodology for railroad transportation of hazmats, which was independent of accident rates and established a relation between hazmat volume and consequence.  Accident rate based analysis is often vulnerable to absence of enough data points, but the above methodology enabled me to tide over this limitation.  The risk assessment methodology was then used to model the operations of freight trains in a railroad network, where freight involved both hazardous and regular cargo.  Through this Discovery Grant, I intend to study hazmat risk in railroad, maritime and intermodal transportation frameworks.  Within the railroad domain, measures and mitigation of risk, development and implementation of a new railcar blocking technique, and scheduling of unit-trains would be studied.  Risk assessment, estimation and assignment of transportation and risk costs, and scheduling of container ships will be studied in context of maritime transportation.  Conditions of dominance, routing models and their solution methodologies in context of rail-truck intermodal transportation system, and investigating other forms of intermodalism constitute other projects in intermodal transportation.  The long term objective of this proposal is to develop methodologies and techniques for the assessment and mitigation of hazmat transportation risk, and also to develop decision support systems for managers and regulators to facilitate safe and secure transportation of hazardous shipments.