Determination of Social Risk by Computational Modeling and Its Use in the Transportation Risk Assessment

The use of quantitative risk analysis in industrial processes is an indispensable tool when it comes to providing subsidies for development of an effective emergency action plan or to assist in decision making on investment in equipment, staff or training.

The use of computational tools for this analysis, makes this task more quickly and with a higher credit in the results, since the software has the database updated, and perform calculations with a large number of variables

This paper aims to present the use of computational modeling as tool to determine the social risk involved in the route developed for the transport of toxic, flammable and combustible substances, using existing data of failure rate and population density.

The result is a plot (on a satellite photo) of the vulnerability areas and iso-risk lines on the path of hazardous material, beyond the FN curve, which is the accumulated frequency versus the number of fatalities.

This tool provides information to the decision-making on to different paths with the same type of transport in addition to comparisons among different types of transport, comparing the FN curves for each situation.

Two cases will be described. The first one compares the road transport of a hazardous material by 2 different routes. The second one, compares the transport of hazardous material by 3 different ways: road, rail or by pipeline.

The modeling takes into account characteristics of product and the leakage, method of conditioning the product, environmental conditions (wind speed, temperature and atmosferic stability class), the failure rate of accidents and people around the path.