A Model-Based Approach to Support Safety-Related Decisions in the Petroleum Domain

Abstract

Abstract-Accidents on petroleum installations can have huge consequences; to mitigate the risk, a number of safety barriers are devised. Faults and unexpected events may cause barriers to temporarily deviate from their nominal state. For safety reasons, a work permit process is in place: decision makers accept or reject work permits based on the current state of barriers. However, this is difficult to estimate, as it depends on a multitude of physical, technical and human factors. Information obtained from different sources needs to be aggregated by humans, typically within a limited amount of time. In this paper we propose an approach to provide an automated decision support to the work permit system, which consists in the evaluation of quantitative measures of the risk associated with the execution of work. The approach relies on state-based stochastic models, which can be automatically composed based on the work permit to be examined.

Stochastic modeling and analysis of vapor cloud explosions domino effects in chemical plants

“…For example, the authors of [12] used (untimed) Petri nets to model interdependencies between critical infrastructures and to verify that specific invariants are not violated. SANs have been used in [21] to define an approach for the evaluation of the risk associated with the execution of maintenance operations on petroleum installations. Similarly, the work in [6] defined a framework based on SANs to model and evaluate the impact of cascading effects in electric power systems.…”