GOODROUTE - Dangerous Goods Transportation Routing and Monitoring
Overview
Background & policy context:
Although, according to statistics, the risk of accidents in critical infrastructures such as tunnels and long bridges is lower than on open roads and motorways, when accidents/incidents do happen, they may have multiple effects. Over 200 people have died in Europe as result of tunnel fires (successive effect of collisions) in the last decade (16 fire accidents occurred in road tunnels in Europe from 1986 until 2006), while 3% of the accidents onbridges are fatal (vs. 2% in total accidents). The Mont Blanc, the Tauern and the Gotthard tunnel catastrophes, among others, have demonstrated the urgent need for improving the prevention and mitigation of tunnel accidents, including adequate detection systems in combination with being prepared operation staff and emergency services.
Besides loss of human life and the tremendous economic cost (the Gotthard tunnel accident cost was estimated to be € 12 million, only in terms of repair and insured losses for vehicles), a single crash may close the infrastructure for many hours, creating long queues and delays, with vast financial cost induced for the whole business chain, let alone the environmental cost due to traffic pollution in queues, noise pollution and wasted energy (fuel) during queuing.
As a result of accidents, traffic jams but also road works and other unexpected events but also due to the different national regulations and individual infrastructure policies (i.e. Dangerous Goods vehicles are not allowed in Gotthard tunnel), truck drivers are often forced to follow secondary roads and alternative routes. But the actual accident risk and impact when using secondary roads or other alternative ways is not calculated. They have no particular guidance on the safest alternative when they need to re-route, whereas the consequences of road choice are not known to the business chain.
Objectives:
GOOD ROUTE attempted to address these problems by developing a cooperative system for Dangerous Goods Vehicles (DGV) routing, in order minimise the Societal Risks related to their movements, while still generating cost efficient solutions for all logistic chain actors involved. Besides routing, the developed system supports monitoring, re-routing (in case of need), enforcement and driver support, achieving its aims by utilising dynamic, real time as well as historical data.
The GOOD ROUTE Project objectives were aimed to:
- Analyse dangerous goods accidents and needs of the dangerous goods companies, transporters, drivers, recipient clients, transport infrastructure owners, authorities, etc., as well as the best practises followed so far, for the specification of an integrated, cost-efficient, fair and modular system.
- Develop an ontological framework, which will classify and correlate the dangerous cargo, vehicle types and road infrastructure elements, to automatically permit or re-route specific dangerous good vehicles through specific road infrastructures (i.e. tunnels, long bridges, etc.).
- Develop a collaborative platform, able to gather and process in real time vehicle, cargo and environmental data (road status, unexpected obstacles, weather conditions, population density) as input to an optimal routing and route guidance system.
- Develop a minimum risk guidance system, that is able to route and re-route dangerous goods vehicles, taking into account individual and societal risk (based upon the collaborative platform based dynamic data), as well as conflict resolution and equity schemes.
- Develop Control Centre algorithms that will deal with movements of all participating dangerous goods vehicles within a certain geographical area, provide the necessary traffic and environmental data to them and inform in real time their logistic chain for any unscheduled re-routing required.
- Develop an on-board automatic data retrieval and storage system, to monitor key dangerous goods vehicle parameters (actual vs. planned route, speed, weight per axle, etc.), able to supply it to local nodes (i.e. police car at toll station or before tunnel/bridge, etc.), for enforcement purposes.
- Develop optimal user interfaces for both the drivers of the dangerous goods vehicle and the control centre operators, to provide them with appropriate information and/or warnings, without adversely affecting their workload or causing unnecessary behavioural adaptation
Methodology:
The work under the project was structured in WPs as follows:
- WP1: Traffic safety vs. mobility needs
- WP2: Minimum Risk Route Guidance system
- WP3: On board Telematic System
- WP4: Infrastructure Telematic System
- WP5: Enforcement System
- WP6: Cooperative System Integration
- WP7: Pilot testing
- WP8: Guidelines, Training and standards
- WP9: Dissemination and exploitation
- WP10: Project management.
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