This document summarizes a study that developed a transportation network assessment tool to route hazardous material cargo while minimizing health risk, delay cost, and trucking cost. The study used dispersion modeling to assess health risks from truck accidents and estimated travel costs, delay costs, and routing options through scripting. Key findings were that the output network can be used to establish safe truck routes, the method is sensitive to location-specific data, and routing can be optimized to reduce environmental and population impacts as well as costs.

1. Transportation Network Assessment Tool for Hazardous Materials Cargo Routing: Health Risk,
Delay Cost and Trucking Cost
Bahareh Inanloo1, Advisor: Dr. Berrin Tansel1
1Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Florida International University, Miami, FL, 33174.
Figure 2
As a result of the highway crashes involving hazardous material
shipments, societal cost of the impacts are estimated to be over
$1 billion per year.
The objective of this study are to:
 Identify vulnerable segments of the transportation network for
carrying hazardous materials.
 Investigate transportation networks in regards to different
criteria, such as: trucking cost, health risk and cost of delay.
 Gaussian air dispersion model
was used to assess the health
risk followed by gasoline
release of a tanker truck
caused by an accident.
 ArcGIS paired with Python
programming was used to
estimate the health impact,
travel cost and delay cost
through scripting.
 Queuing approach employed
for delay calculation.
Materials and Methods
Background and Objectives Results Results
Acknowledgements
Funding for this research has been provided by Southeastern
Transportation Research, Innovation, Development & Education
Center STRIDE, University Transportation Center of University of
Florida.
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Conclusions
1. The output network by this study can be used to establish a hazardous martial truck allowed segment network for cities and counties.
2. The proposed method and the output network is sensitive to the data and is location based, also is capable of modeling different
chemicals other than gasoline.
3. The result of this study can be employed in decision making process to efficiently reroute hazardous material cargos to the paths with
less environmental risks and less population involved, as well as, less delay cost and possibly less travel cost.
4. Based on the results, the cargo transport can be rescheduled, so that, not only the best route is identified but also the best time for the
cargo to be transported be determined.
 Atmospheric condition (stability class) was identified based on
the solar radiation and sky cover data maps according to the
location of each road segment.
 Delay cost was calculated for each segment according to the
data on the number of lanes, class of road, traffic volume using
Python scripting.
 Trucking cost was identified based on the length of the segments.
A
Travel Cost
Cargo
characteristics
Health Risk
Network of
truck
segment
analysis
Delay Cost
Crash data
Solar radiation
Sky cover
Chemical
concentration
Wind speed
Traffic volume
Number of
Lanes
Truck traffic
volume
Function class
Duration and
extend of
closure
Length of
segment
Cost per mile
travel
Cost per hour
delay