The HITERM Demonstrators

The HITERM projects has produced three major demonstration cases, each of them illustrated with an on-line slide show:

Chemical process plants (Italy) using the example of the Ponte S.Pietro industrial district in Bergamo, Northern Italy, a number of accident scenarios following the Seveso II guidelines for the plants in this area have been formulated and simulated. The primary objective of the Italian Demonstrator was to show a completely integrated operational system including the transparent integration of high-performance parallel models (spill, wind field, Lagrangian atmospheric dispersion model) based on PVM and a workstation cluster.
Railway transport (Switzerland) The Swiss Demonstrator concentrates on the transport of hazardous material by train, across the strategic North-South Alpine corridors. The example of the Reuss valley as a steep alpine valley with an extreme orography poses a considerable challenge to the atmospheric dispersion models, but demonstrates the need for advanced complex models and thus high-performance computing to obtain realistic and reliable forecasts of the evolution of an emergency. The case study implements the RTXPS real-time expert system as the decision support framework for emergency management.
Road transport (Portugal) The Portuguese test case finally concentrates on a very practical case: more than a hundred fuel trucks make the daily trip from the Aveiras fuel depot to the Airport of Lisbon along the major North-South highway leading into the capital. Accident scenarios for the fuel trucks include fire, explosion, and soil and groundwater contamination. An on-board alarm unit with GPS/GSM communication triggers the RTXPS expert system.

In addition to the three major case studies, and a number of smaller applications, primarily designed to test and illustrate specific features and functions of the system have been built.

These demonstration cases also include on-line web-based client-server demos of:

The Metodo Speditivo fast risk assessment method; The Italian Method for the: PIANIFICAZIONE DI EMERGENZA ESTERNA PER IMPIANTI INDUSTRIALI A RISCHIO DI INCIDENTE RILEVANTE (Metodo Speditivo) uses a set of tabulated values for primary and secondary impact zones, based on the substance characteristics, the amount, storage conditions, and finally the weather where atmospheric dispersion of a toxic substance is among the impact scenarios. The Dynamic Multi-Puff atmospheric dispersion model in combination with the DWM multi-layer diagnostic wind model describes the dynamic evolution of an intermittent atmospheric release typical for an accidental spill. The model can be used for complex terrain and time-variable release patterns, and is linked to an assessment branch that estimates population exposure.