Towards Safer Transporting in Resilient Cities: Risk Assessment and Path Planning

Safely transporting hazardous chemicals is a desirable property of a resilient city. Hazardous chemicals, which range from gasoline to floral water, are closely relevant to the lives of residents in cities. During loading, unloading, and transportation of hazardous chemicals, accidents might happen, which will interfere with the normal operations of cities. In this paper, we propose a method named SRA to offer safe routes for transportation of hazardous chemicals. SRA consists of two parts. Firstly, on the basis of urban population and the distributions of 13 kinds of POIs which are closely related to the basic functions of a city, a risk assessment mechanism is made to assess the risks for vehicle trajectories. Subsequently, a path planning algorithm based on A∗ search is proposed to guide drivers who transport hazardous chemicals. We conduct experiments on the trajectory data of vehicles transporting hazardous chemicals in Shenzhen, China. Experimental results show that the proposed risk assessment mechanism is feasible and the planned paths have low safety risks.