Approaches to transportation problems involving hazardous material risk and impacts from a natural disaster.

摘要

In the past few years there have been an increasing amount of events that involved a natural disaster and man-made hazardous materials (HazMat); we call these events NaHaz events. These NaHaz events have raised environmental concerns, socio-economic concerns and concerns for injury or death. Natural disasters and unintentional man-made HazMat releases are both low-probability, high-consequence events. An event that involves both a natural disaster and unintentional releases of HazMat are very low probability, but can have an extremely high consequence. With the continuously rising population and reliance on HazMat goods, the probability of these events and their prospective consequences are growing. There is an increasing need for research on this topic, due to these potentially catastrophic impacts. Currently many other fields are developing research to alleviate these devastating impacts; but we found minimal OR/MS research applicable to these events. In this paper, we assess how OR/MS techniques can be employed to alleviate the potential impacts of these NaHaz events. Furthermore, we present a model that incorporates ideas presented in this paper.