Integrated Risk Assessment of Hazardous Chemical Installations Using GIS and AHP

The aim of this research is to develop and implement a simple and easy-used method to major industrial chemical hazard risk assessment. Firstly, a new approach for the rapid assessment and relative ranking of the hazardous chemical installations is presented, which employed a multi-criteria decision-making technique (the analytic hierarchy process) for the hazard assessment of the substances and installations. The spatial data (water distribution, roads, fire forces, medical forces, density of population, economic situation, and so on) of the surroundings of the hazardous chemical installations are input into a geographical information system, with the functions of the GIS program, it is easy to assess the risk of hazardous chemical installations. Moreover, we put this method into practice in the case of the emergency management agency of Kunshan City and achieved satisfactory results. The proposed approach is not only scientifically valuable, but provides a more realistic assessment of hazardous chemical installations for local emergency management agency. The integration of geographical information systems and the analytic hierarchy process constitutes to be a powerful tool for risk assessment of hazardous chemical installations.