A data-driven inspection method for identifying container bookings with concealed hazardous materials

Hazardous materials (a.k.a. hazmats) are transported by containers with special equipment in transportation engineering but must be declared prior to shipment. Some shippers deliberately conceal hazmat information in their container bookings to gain a higher profit, which has potentially serious consequences. To reduce such risk, the inspection office selects a part of the containers for hazmat concealment inspection, but the efficiency is low. In this study, a data-driven inspection method is proposed for identifying container bookings with concealed hazmats by exploring the relationship between inspection results and items in the container booking information profile filled by shippers. A tailored cost-sensitive loss function is designed to address the class imbalance issue. The application of the proposed method is validated by case studies based on the hazmat inspection database from Ningbo Ocean Shipping Company. The findings provide instructive implications on the identification of subsequent container bookings that are of high interest for inspection.