Risk assessment of hazmat road transportation accidents before, during, and after the accident using Bayesian network

Abstract

Risk exists in the whole process of before, during and after the accident of hazardous materials (hazmat) transportation, which usually lead to serious consequences. Risk assessment is a significant way to identify hidden dangers and their interactions, which can curb accidents happen. The purpose of this study is to analyze the risk factors of hazmat road transportation accidents through entire process risk assessment and propose management strategies. Considering nodes dependency, i.e. accident type and rescue time, this study applies the concept of Tree Augmented Naive Bayes (TAN) and built a hazmat road transportation Bayesian network (HRT-BN). Mutual information and model validation are carried on to better facilitate convenient inference and diagnosis of risk nodes and their interactions. Results show that in causal inference with single factors, human risk factors are more significant, which are likely to lead to leakage accident with slight consequences and short rescue time (s2). Meanwhile, with coupling effect of multiple factors, accident types become more diverse with serious consequence. In diagnostic inference, the rescue time is linked to seasonal and regional factors, e.g., the rescue time in summer is longer. Based on these analysis, targeted recommendations have been proposed at the end. This study provides a whole angle of view to assess risks in hazmat transportation, which has significant practical feasibility for risk management and planning of hazmat road transportation.