In Taiwan, relevant mid-term plans and projects of mitigating occupational hazards have been launched in recent years in the hopes of lowering the incidence of occupational hazards. In light of the lack of objective methodologies for researches on issues pertaining occupational safety and health, this research aims to explore the priorities of safety and health issues through focal groups, expe...

The objective of the German government’s policy on waste is to achieve a recyclingbased economy that conserves resources and reduces adverse impacts on the environment. The aim is to increase and optimise the efficient use of raw materials, to maximise recovery quotas and to permanently remove from our environment any residual waste that can no longer be used. This will lead to a substance mana...

Environmental justice advocates in the US and internationally have argued that hazardous materials industries are a source of significant community disruption and environmental hazard. Few of these studies, however, have examined firms' accident frequencies or how accidents are distributed across metropolitan regions. This research argues that accident frequencies differ significantly among fir...

Waste minimization in the automotive repair industry is characterized by the large numbers of small quantity generators (SQG) producing solvent, alkaline and detergent hazardous wastes. On-site management of multiple processes which vary depending on the size of shop make the administration of hazardous waste policies particularly complex. This paper presents the quantities and types of hazardo...

This paper investigates whether the choice experiment approach can be used to assess peoples’ preferences and the determinants of these preferences in order to estimate the costs and benefits of different configurations of transports of hazardous materials on railways. In the study, changes in the exposure to hazardous materials that affected people are subjected to are used rather than changes...

This paper introduces a Value-at-Risk (VaR) model to generate route choices for a hazmat shipment based on a specified risk confidence level. The objective is to determine a route which minimizes the likelihood that the risk will be greater than a set threshold. Several properties of the VaR model are established. An exact solution procedure is proposed and tested to solve the single-trip probl...

Hazardous waste management incorporates collection, separation, treatment, recycling and disposal of hazardous wastes. In this paper, a new multi-objective mixed integer model is presented for hazardous waste collection problem. The model aims to minimize transportation and construction costs, and environmental and population risks in hazardous waste management systems. This model is applied in...

Dual-arm robotic system for load transportation in hazardous environments is considered in this study. First, physical model of the robot arms with the load is presented and related equations of motion are obtained. Friction forces arising on the contact points between the load and robot arm tips are also taken into account. Then, robust non-chattering sliding mode control is used in order to o...

In this paper the Path Dissimilarity Problem is considered. The problem has been previously studied in several contexts, the most popular motivated by the need of selecting routes for transportation of hazardous materials. The aim of this paper is to formally introduce the problem as a bi-objective optimization problem, in which a single solution consists of a set of p different paths, and two ...