Transportation Hazard Analysis in Integrated GIS Environment

Abstract

With geographic information systems for transportation (GISTs) gaining wider acceptance by government agencies, attention is turning to the application of this information technology to sophisticated transportation management problems, often requiring real‐time decision making. Two areas of priority concern that many agencies have identified are the management of highway incidents and transportation hazard analysis. Incident management considerations include those of emergency response deployment and rerouting to bypass the affected area. Transportation hazard analysis also addresses dynamic routing and emergency preparedness in the case of a hazardous‐materials transport release, and involves comprehensive risk assessment and evacuation planning. The objective of this paper is to describe methods employing GIST that can provide the capability to perform transportation hazard analysis and incident management. These methods are subsequently applied in several case studies involving highway operations in California to illustrate their implementation. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the GIST approach to incident management may be extended to address dynamic management in an intelligent‐vehicle‐highway‐system environment.