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The purpose of this paper is to develop a multi-agent-based simulation model for the online opinion dissemination during hazardous chemical leakage emergencies into rivers in China, to explore an appropriate crisis information release policy of China’s government for controlling public panic.

In the proposed model, two fundamental attributes of crisis information, i.e., truthfulness (for true or false news) and attitude (for positive, neutral or negative opinion), are considered. Four major agents in the online community system, i.e., citizens, the government, media and opinion leaders, are included. Using four typical accidents of hazardous chemical leakage into rivers in China as case studies, insightful policy implications can be obtained for crisis management and panic control.

The news about the terrible potential damages from such a type of accidents will instantly arise wide-ranging public panic; therefore, the corresponding crisis information release policy should be carefully designed. It is strongly advised against publishing false news to temporarily conceal the accidents, which will seriously hurt the government’s reputation and agitate much larger-scale public panic in terms of degree and duration. To mitigate public panic, the true news especially about treatment measurements should be published immediately. If the government does nothing and releases no crisis information, the public panic will go out of control.

This paper only focuses on the crisis information release policies from the perspectives of the government. Furthermore, this study especially focuses on the cases in China, and extending the proposed model study for general contexts is an important direction to improve this study. Finally, the proposed model should be extended to other types of emergencies to further justify its generalization and universality, especially various natural catastrophes like storms, floods, tsunamis, etc.

This paper develops a multi-agent-based model for online public opinion dissemination in emergency to explore an appropriate crisis information release policy for controlling public panic stemming from hazardous chemicals leakage accidents into rivers. The proposed model makes major contributions to the literature from two perspectives. First, the crisis information about emergency accidents are divided into true and false news based on the truthfulness attribute, and into neutral, positive and negative emotions based on the attitude attribute. Second, the proposed model covers the main agents in the online virtual community.

The purpose of this paper is to present a mobile robot with an olfactory capability for hazardous site survey. Possible applications include detection of gas leaks and dangerous substances along predefined paths, inspection of pipes in factories, and mine sweeping.

The mobile sentry is equipped with a transducer array of tin oxide chemical sensors, compliant with the standard interface IEEE 1451, which provides odour‐sensing capability, and uses differential drive and spring‐suspended odometric trackballs to move and localize in the environment. The monitoring strategy comprises two stages. First, a path learning operation is performed where the vehicle is remotely controlled through some potential critical locations of the environment, such as valves, pressure vessels, and pipelines. Then, the robot automatically tracks the prerecorded trajectory, while serving as an electronic watch by providing a real‐time olfactory map of the environment. Laboratory experiments are described to validate the approach and assess the performance of the proposed system.

The approach was shown to be effective in experimental trials where the robot was able to detect multiple odour sources and differentiate between sources very close to one another.

One limitation of the methodology is that it has been specifically designed for odour detection along a well‐defined path in a highly structured environment, such as that expected in the industrial field. The problem of detection of leakages outside the search path is not addressed here.

This mobile robot can be of great value to detect hazardous fluid leakages in chemical warehouses and industrial sites, thus increasing the safety level for human operators.

The paper describes a mobile robotic system, which employs an odour‐sensing capability to perform automated monitoring of hazardous industrial sites. A dynamic model of the mobile nose is also discussed and it is shown that it well describes the behaviour of the system.

The chemical plant (CP) maintenance industry has been under increasing pressure by process designers to demonstrate its evaluation and information management of model checking (MC) on the durability’s performance and design of plant control instrument. This main problem has been termed as imperfect maintenance actions (IMAs) level. Although IMAs have been explored in interdisciplinary maintenance environments, less is known about what imperfect maintenance problems currently exist and what their causes are, such as the recent explosion in the Beirut city (4 August 2020, about 181 fatalities). The aim of this paper is to identify how CP maintenance environments could integrate MC within their processes.

To achieve this aim, a comprehensive literature review of the existing conceptualisation of MC practices is reviewed and the main features of information and communication technology tools and techniques currently being employed on such IMA projects are carried out and synthesised into a conceptual framework for integrating MC in the automation system process.

The literature reveals that various CP designers conceptualise MC in different ways. MC is commonly shaped by long-term compliance to fulfil the requirement for maintaining a comfortable durability risk on imperfect maintenance schemes of CP projects. Also, there is a lack of common approaches for integrating the delivery process of MC. The conceptual framework demonstrates the importance of early integration of MC in the design phase to identify alternative methods to cogenerate, monitor and optimise MC.

Thus far, this study advances the knowledge about how CP maintenance environments can ensure MC delivery. This paper highlights the need for further research to integrate MC in CP maintenance environments. A future study could validate the framework across the design phase with different CP project designers.

The objective was to outline a process for selecting hazardous substances as pollution indicators that imply a chemical risk for the recycling of wastewater residues on arable land and for wastewater discharge into receiving waters. The reviewed methodologies showed one commonality: grouping of various characteristics that symbolise hazardous properties. From each group, one or several indicator substances were selected to represent the hazardous property of that specific group. The selected set of indicator substances represented the chemical risk characteristics as a whole. One conclusion is that it is difficult to create a comprehensive list of indicator substances for the monitoring of chemical risks in wastewater and residues. Due to the insufficiency of knowledge about the chemical risks from complex systems such as a wastewater system and the methodology for selecting indicator substances, many simplifications have to be accepted. The 100,000 substances present in the technosphere, of which 30,000 are regarded as “everyday” chemicals, may end up in wastewater systems. We have a limited knowledge of many of these substances, thereby providing a weak base for assessing the true chemical risks in wastewater and residues for reuse on arable land. Although the pollution situation will not entirely be understood by measuring the status of only a few substances (important substances may be overlooked), detected substances indicate a specific pollution situation in wastewater or sludge, thus increasing our knowledge about the current concentrations.

For the purpose of reducing the incidence of hazardous materials transport accident, eliminating the potential threats and ensuring their safety, aiming at the shortcomings in the process of current hazardous materials transportation management, this paper aims to construct the framework of hazardous materials transportation safety management system under the vehicle-infrastructure connected environment.

The system takes the intelligent connected vehicle as the main supporter, integrating GIS, GPS, eye location, GSM, networks and database technology.

By analyzing the transportation characteristics of hazardous materials, this system consists of five subsystems, which are vehicle and driver management subsystem, dangerous sources and hazardous materials management subsystem, route analysis and optimization subsystem, early warning and emergency rescue management subsystem, and basic information query subsystem.

Hazardous materials transportation safety management system includes omnibearing real-time monitoring, timely updating of system database, real-time generation and optimization of emergency rescue route. The system can reduce the transportation cost and improve the ability of accident prevention and emergency rescue of hazardous materials.

To present an entirely new technology to be used in the in‐service inspection of storage tanks for hazardous products in several different industries.

Current interior storage oil tank plate inspection is a very expensive and time‐consuming task. The related tasks involve high cost, several hazards to environment and the operators involved in the cleaning jobs. Several research areas were investigated during the development of this tool, fundamentally robotics and non‐destructive test tools. Initial trials in laboratory were complemented with a field test program in near‐real conditions.

A new design of tool for in‐service inspection of such equipments proved to be feasible to be constructed and operated and in accordance with current safety regulations.

New robotics application in non‐destructive testing methodologies for application in in‐service storage equipments. The internal conditions possible to find in the interior of a storage tank, like fixtures, properties of the stored products (inflammable and aggressive), sludge and sand on the bottom, no ambient light, etc., are significant challenges to the development of such a tool.

Developed a robotized tool for inspection of the floor and walls of in‐service tanks, in order to allow an evaluation of the condition of the plates of these tanks, avoiding the long period, hazards and high costs necessary for creating the conditions for reality out of service inspection.

The novelty of the RobTank Inspec project could be evaluated from the two or three existing competitors in the world, and the results of the surveys undertaken.

Glaxo has developed a corporate source of comprehensive information on hazardous substances, which is available to staff throughout the Glaxo Group as an online Substance Information Database (SID) or via print. A structured approach has been taken to data collection, with key hard copy and computerised health and safety information sources being searched in a hierarchical fashion. Through a knowledge of the coverage of the sources, and practical experience of their use, a complete substance information profile is built up through selective searching. The data is evaluated by in‐house specialists in toxicology, occupational health and safety and the compiled data sheet is authorised by the appropriate Company Safety Co‐ordinator before it is released onto SID.