Tunnel QRA: Present and Future Perspectives

With the vision of faster in-land transportation of humans and goods, long tunnels with increasing engineering complexities are being designed, constructed and operated. Such complexities arise due to terrain (network of small tunnels) and requirement of multiple entries and exits (network of traffics leading to non-homogenous behaviour). Increased complexities of such tunnels throw unique challenges for performing QRA for such tunnels, which gets compounded due to handful number of experiments performed in real tunnels, as they are costly and dangerous. A combined approach of CFD modelling of scaled down tunnels could be a relatively less resource intensive solution, nevertheless, associated with its increased uncertainties due to introduction of scaling multiplication factors. Further, with the advent of smart system designs and cheap computational cost, a smart tunnel which manages its own traffic of both dangerous goods carriers and other passenger vehicles based on continuously updated dynamic risk estimate, is not far from reality.