Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Syllabus

INTRODUCTION TO TRANSPORTATION RISK ANALYSIS

Course Description
This course provides an introduction to transportation risk analysis. It covers risk management
framework, and risk assessment concepts and methodologies focusing on freight transportation
and using examples based on railroad hazardous materials transportation risk.

This course is particularly suitable for managers, planners, engineers, other professionals or
students who are or will be involved in transportation supply chain.

Course Goals and Objectives

After completing this course students will be able to:

1. Understand basic concepts in transportation risk

2. Structure transportation risk problems by identifying potential hazards, initiating events,
likelihood and accident consequences
3. Identify data needs to perform transportation risk analysis
4. Perform a comprehensive transportation risk analysis

Recommended Background
Familiarity with probability/statistics

Course Outline
Module 1: Introduction
 Risk and risk management
 Transportation risk management
 Transportation risk key definitions
 Structuring risky scenario - influence diagram and risk tree

Module 2: Basic Risk Analysis Methodologies

 Transportation risk assessment
 Qualitative and semi-quantitative transportation risk analysis
 Quantitative transportation risk analysis

Module 3: Quantitative Transportation Risk Analysis Examples

 Overview of hazardous materials transportation
 Environmental risk analysis of railroad transportation of hazardous materials
 Transportation infrastructure risk reduction strategy optimization

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Module 4: ArcGIS Mapping
 Introduction to ArcGIS
 Consequence Analysis Tutorial

Module 5: Advanced Topics on Transportation Risk

 Biases and decision traps in risk management
 More to come in the future…

Suggested Reading
Guidelines for Chemical Transportation Safety, Security, and Risk Management.

Course Format
This course consists of multiple 5-15 minute lecture videos, lecture-specific assignments and
Q&A discussion. There will be a peer reviewed final assignment to prepare a two-page report at
the end of the course describing and modeling a student chosen transportation risk problem.
Workload: 2-10 hours of watching lectures and completing assignments.

About the Instructor

Dr. Rapik Saat is Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental
Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are
transportation safety and risk analysis, high-speed rail planning, railroad civil engineering
economics, data mining and operations research. He has been involved in rail and
transportation engineering research for eleven years. His dissertation research focused on
development and application of optimization models to evaluate the most cost-effective
approaches to improve safety and reduce public and environmental risk due to rail transport of
hazardous materials. The methods he developed were used by the Association of American
Railroads (AAR) in their development of new specifications for toxic inhalation hazard (TIH) tank
cars which were later adapted to regulations by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT)
Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) in their amendment to the
Hazardous Materials Regulations in 2009. He played a major role in a project to analyze
approaches to develop and implement an accident reporting database system to collect
information on the nature and extent of damage to U.S. DOT-specified hazardous materials bulk
packages (i.e., portable tanks and cargo tank motor vehicles) involved in accidents. He used
statistical data-mining techniques to analyze historical railcar health records from multiple
Wayside Defect Detector (WDD) systems to recognize patterns and develop reliable innovative
rules to predict the service failures and reduce related risks on railroads. Originally from
Malaysia, Dr. Saat received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering all from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.