A Comprehensive Risk Assessment Framework for Rail Transport of Hazardous Materials

A number of risk measures including those based on incident probability and population exposure have been developed for rail transport of hazardous materials (hazmat). This paper presents a comprehensive risk assessment framework, which incorporates the sequence of events leading to hazmat release from derailed railcars and the resulting consequence, and demonstrates its use on a realistic size problem instance from the United States. It was very interesting to note that although risk models developed for rail are distinct than those for roads, use of different models resulted in different solutions for rail transport of hazmat —much like for road transport.