Hazardous Materials Transportation Expert System (HaMTES)

Under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Transportation Management Division (TMD), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has designed and developed an expert system application of the hazardous materials transportation regulations. The Hazardous Materials Transportation Expert System (HaMTES) was developed to provide straightforward and error-free application of hazardous materials transportation regulations. The interactive system is designed to give users access to knowledge and skills that previously could be obtained only from a highly trained and experienced expert in the hazardous materials shipping regulations. The HaMTES, Version 1.0, was based on the 1995 regulations. It was not officially released by DOE for use by the governmental community. HaMTES, Version 2.0, includes the U.S. regulatory changes recently enacted to align the U.S. regulations with 1985 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Safety Series (SS) 6. Version 2.0 also includes several other enhancements suggested during the beta testing of Version 1.0. The TMD has several different software applications under development. Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions are being held to analyze, improve, and discuss the integration of these transportation-related software packages. As DOE funding allows, it is anticipated that HaMTES will be the core of the hazardous materials module of the Automated Transportation Management System (A TMS), which was also developed under the sponsorship of the TMD to provide field offices and site contractors with the automated tools necessary for transacting the increasingly complex transportation management tasks. The A TMS provides the mechanism for using technological advances to reduce DOE's current reliance on labor-intensive, manual processes. Thus, through the application of this technology in operations, the potential for human error when applying the transportation regulations can be virtually eliminated, and...