Today, the internship finally started. We had a kick-off meeting at 8:00 AM. After meeting the rest of the undergraduate interns and the graduate mentors, professor Rapik explained us clearly what are the expectations, objectives and methodologies of the program. I am going to be working with Chen-Yu (grad student) and, among other things, I will perform a railroad transportation risk study. Later we were told that during the next two weeks we are going to undertake a quantitative risk analysis for a company in order to assess for each given route the risk associated with the transportation of a hazardous material by railroad. This is very exciting as the company will decide which route is most suitable based partly on the results of this study. After a short presentation about a similar analysis performed in other routes by some of the grad students, we were shown to what will be our office for the next two months.
Jesus and Xiang gave us a two-hour GIS basic tutorial. After that I started to work on my own, first going over everything they explained us one more time, and then doing online GIS tutorials mainly focussing on the Network Analyst tool. One of the exercise that I carried out was the calculation of the route that would minimize the time necessary to go through points 1 to 14 (not necessarily in order) as it is shown in Fig1. This task was accomplished using the roadway system of a city including length and allowed velocity for each street. These different examples have allowed me to remember some concepts and GIS tools that I had forgotten.
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| Fig1: Route optimization using ArcMAP's tool Network Analyst. |
Tomorrow:
-Jesus and Xiang GIS tutorial II-Go over the tutorial II
-Remind some other useful GIS tools: Merge, Buffer, Intersect
-Understand all the steps of their qualitative risk analysis
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