A distributed information system prototype to detect and monitor the Hazardous Material Transport on the road in the territory of Nice-Imperia-Ventimiglia

This paper aims to present a Decision Support System (DSS) for the detection and monitoring of Hazardous Material (hazmat) transportation on the road infrastructure Nice-Imperia-Savona between France and Italy developed in the TMD-NIS Interreg IIIA Alcotra Project. The final objective of the TMD-NIS project is to determine the most effective information and communication technologies and common operation strategies applicable in hazmat management in order to minimize the hazmat transport risk and to improve the road infrastructure safety conditions. An integrated and comparative assessment of two alternative technologies has been performed by the partners of the project: an image processing system to identify the ONU codes on the hazmat plates installed on each truck has been tested in France, while an on-board computer system to store and transmit information related to the hazmat physical conditions, vehicle’s locations and performance measures has been implemented in Italy. The collaboration between the different research institutions and the complementarities of the two specific approaches to define and monitor the hazmat vehicle flows allow comparison and validation of the acquired data related to the type, the amount and the itineraries of the hazmat vehicles which cover the trans-border road infrastructures daily. At present, the TMD-NIS project also provides a GIS utility, available on the web, to track in real-time hazmat vehicles, to analyse data about hazmat flows and to visualize the risk index for the highway from the toolbar barriers of St. Isidore (Nice) to the Ventimille.