Safety in Hazardous Material Road Transportation: State of the Art and Emerging Problems

In the last years, numerous accidents have made to lift the level of attention related to the safety in the road transportation of hazardous materials. Also in absence of serious wounded, the dangerousness of the interventions requires very long times for the restoration of the normal road circulation causing huge damages economic and strong discomforts to the users. The hazmat transportation is disciplined for a long time by the ADR. However it only concerns passive measures related to the vehicles, to the packing and the labelling of materials, but it does not prescribe provisions to adopt during the trip. The purpose of the present job is to furnish a wide overview of the risk forecast and prevention and of emergency activation measures resorting to the employment of technological and operational systems and especially to the decision support systems tools.