Abstract
Article history: Received June 20, 2012 Received in Revised form August, 20, 2012 Accepted 25 August 2012 Available online 3 September 2012 Development of industries needs expansion of public transportation and, consequently, heavy transportation increases hazardous and dangerous transportation too. Therefore, we need to consider some strategies to reduce bad effects of transportation of hazardous materials such as road accidents. Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Treats (SWOT) analysis is an applicable method for designing strategies in this area. However, SWOT analysis does not provide specific strategies and it does not consider the efficiency and performance of each strategy. Applying a hybrid method of analyzing the strategies and their performance evaluation help decision makers select the best strategies based on the current limitations. In this paper, different strategies for hazardous transportation risk reduction are designed and relative efficiencies of all alternatives are compared using DEA method. The proposed model of this paper uses three inputs including implementation costs, operation and maintenance cost and operational and four outputs including accident rate reduction, fuel consumption reduction, employment rate increment and deaths number reduction. The results of the implementation using seven different strategies have yielded two important strategies including continuous improvement of vehicle standards, driving skills, transportation system quality, and loading methods and expansion of petroleum pipe network. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Highlights
Hazardous material is defined as some materials that are dangerous for the life of people and environment
Kheirkhah et al (2009), for instance, explained that an increase in hazardous materials transportation in Iran along with the industrial development and increase of resulted deadly accidents necessitate the development and implementation of some strategies to reduce these incidents. They explained that SWOT analysis was an efficient method for developing strategies, its structural problems, including a lack of prioritizing internal and external factors and inability to consider two sided factors reducing its performance in the situations where the number of internal and external factors influencing the risk of hazardous materials was relatively high and some factors are two sided in nature are presented in the article
We present an empirical study to make appropriate strategy selection for transportation of hazardous materials
Summary
Hazardous material is defined as some materials that are dangerous for the life of people and environment. Kheirkhah et al (2009), for instance, explained that an increase in hazardous materials transportation in Iran along with the industrial development and increase of resulted deadly accidents necessitate the development and implementation of some strategies to reduce these incidents. They explained that SWOT analysis was an efficient method for developing strategies, its structural problems, including a lack of prioritizing internal and external factors and inability to consider two sided factors reducing its performance in the situations where the number of internal and external factors influencing the risk of hazardous materials was relatively high and some factors are two sided in nature are presented in the article. The proposed model of this paper uses data envelopment analysis to consider different factors influencing various strategies and order the best efficient strategies
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