A quantitative risk assessment model for domino accidents of hazardous chemicals transportation

In recent years, hazardous materials transportation accidents have received increasing attention. Previous studies have focused on accidents involving a single vehicle. When vehicles loaded with materials gather on a stretch of road, a potential domino accident might cause terrible incidents. This paper prompts a quantitative risk assessment (QRA) model to estimate the risk of multi-vehicle incidents. The model calculates the possibility of leakage and explosion of hazardous chemicals using a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN). For different types of hazardous chemicals, the model uses event trees to list different scenarios and analyzes the probability of domino accidents caused by each scenario. The FN-curve and potential loss of life (PLL) are used as an index to evaluate social risk. A case involving multiple vehicles in the JinShan District, Shanghai, is analyzed. The result of the case shows that the state of the driver, the type of road, weather factors and the distance between vehicles have vital impacts on the societal risk resulting from hazardous materials transportation accidents.