Uncertainty Handling in the Safety Risk Analysis: An Integrated Approach Based on Fuzzy Fault Tree Analysis

Chemical process plants, especially the oil and gas plants operating under severe processing conditions and dealing with hazardous materials, are susceptible to catastrophic accidents. Thus safety risk assessment is vital in designing effective strategies for preventing and mitigating potential acci...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of failure analysis and prevention 2018-04, Vol.18 (2), p.392-404
Main Authors: Yazdi, Mohammad, Zarei, Esmaeil
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accidents
Characterization and Evaluation of Materials
Chemical process industries
Chemistry and Materials Science
Classical Mechanics
Corrosion and Coatings
Fault tree analysis
Fuzzy set theory
Fuzzy sets
Handling
Hazardous materials
Integrated approach
Materials Science
Natural gas
Probabilistic analysis
Qualitative analysis
Quality Control
Reliability
Risk analysis
Risk assessment
Safety
Safety and Risk
Set theory
Solid Mechanics
Statistical analysis
Technical Article > -Peer-Reviewed
Tribology
Uncertainty analysis
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Summary:Chemical process plants, especially the oil and gas plants operating under severe processing conditions and dealing with hazardous materials, are susceptible to catastrophic accidents. Thus safety risk assessment is vital in designing effective strategies for preventing and mitigating potential accidents. Fault tree analysis (FTA) is a well-known technique to analyze the risks related to a specific system. In the conventional FTA, the ambiguities and uncertainties of basic events (BEs) cannot be handled effectively. Therefore, employing fuzzy set theory helps probabilistic estimation of BEs and subsequently the top event (TE). This study presents an integrated approach to fuzzy set theory and FTA for handling uncertainty in the risk analysis of chemical process plants. In this context, the worst case scenario based on a qualitative risk analysis is selected first and then the fuzzy FTA is established. Finally, different fuzzy aggregation and defuzzification approaches are employed to obtain the probability of each BE and TE, the output of each approach is compared to the occurrence probability of TE, and the critical BEs are ranked. The proposed methodology is applied to the fuzzy probabilistic analysis of hydrocarbon release in the BP tragic accident of March 2005. The results indicate that the proposed approach is very effective in risk analysis considering uncertainty reduction or handling.
ISSN:1547-7029
1728-5674
1864-1245
DOI:10.1007/s11668-018-0421-9