Abstract: The paper uses a quantitative approach to evaluate the risk in railway dangerous goods transportation system. First, the railway dangerous goods transportation system is divided into five subsystems: personnel, machine, material, environment and management, and the risk factors in each subsystem are identified. Then, an entropy-TOPSIS-coupling coordination comprehensive evaluation method is worked out by integrating the entropy method, the TOPSIS and the coupling coordination degree model. Following this, the method is used to evaluate the risk in railway dangerous goods transportation system in China. Finally, some suggestions are put forward for improvement. The results show that the railway dangerous goods transportation system in China has become safer in recent years as it grows from ordered to disordered, but the personnel and management subsystems are relatively weak and need to be improved, thus to reduce the coupling effect and ensure transportation safety.

Key words: railway dangerous goods transportation, system risk evaluation, entropy method, technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS), coupling coordination degree model