Spatial Monitoring and Routing System for the Transportation of Hazardous Materials

INTRODUCTION The concept of Environmental Information System (EIS) emerged from the concerns and the efforts carried on by world wide private and official organisations in order to promote an effective use of the environmental data. These data are of various natures such as statistics, thematic maps, or documents describing the identification and the quantification of the environmental resources. The Environmental Information Systems became institutional tools providing pragmatic solutions for sustainable development in various fields. The objective of an EIS is to increase the quality and the efficiency in the decision-making process. To achieve this goal, the EIS requires the integration of various information processing technologies: Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Database Management Systems (DBMS), Space Imagery, Decision Support Systems (DSS), etc. However, the implementation of such an integration generates new requirements, namely, data interoperability, data description by metadata, reverse engineering from existing applications and remote data access and data processing. This leads to reconsider the analysis and the design methodology. Another difficulty of implementation of an EIS comes from the diversity of knowledge concerning the environment and the multiplicity of actors in this field. This leads to various ways to perceive and represent data depending on the field. Actually, not only are these data complex and heterogeneous, but they are also analysed according to multiple points of view. Indeed, the analysis of any phenomenon over the environment can be made from any of the following points of view, be it economic and social, ecological, territorial, demographic or organisational. It involves problems of integration of those points of view, and organisational problems. Finally, data availability is crucial to make an EIS operational. Indeed, an EIS is a federated information system. It interacts with many remote systems that store or produce environmental data. In spite of this distributed system architecture, there should be no failure in accessing data. Specific mechanisms are then necessary such as replicated databases [Pacitti et al., 1999]. This chapter describes an information system reactive toward the vulnerability of the hazardous materials (HazMat) transportation. This system arises from a project involving the authors [Boulmakoul et al., 1997a], [Boulmakoul et al., 1997b]. The project aims at developing a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) for hazardous materials transportation routing and monitoring. Hence, this chapter constitutes an operational contribution in the area of EIS. This chapter is organised as the following. The next section introduces basic concepts and research works related to HazMat …