Analysis of the impact of a pandemic on the control of the process safety risk in major hazards industries using a Fault Tree Analysis approach

Abstract

The control of the risks associated with major hazard events is critical to the safe and continuous operation of the process industry. Over the last decades, the process industry has been successful at establishing and implementing robust Process Safety Management (PSM) systems to prevent and mitigate the consequences of such major hazard events. While there exist some industry guidelines developed relatively recently for events initiated by natural disasters and security-related threats, for initiating events like outbreaks of pathogens and pandemics, there is currently a clear lack of understanding of the impact of the restrictions and disruption caused by a pandemic on the ability of companies operating major hazard facilities to keep controlling the risks associated to their hazardous operations. Moreover, there is no industry guideline on how to account for such an impact in PSM systems for process safety hazards. The recent COVID-19 outbreak caused serious disruptions to normal operations that have challenged industry in their ability to control risks. The objective of this paper is to perform an analysis of the impact of a pandemic situation on the implementation of selected elements of PSM systems related to the identification and evaluation of the risks of a major hazard and their control. The approach chosen involves the analysis of the root causes of the failure of the selected PSM elements using a Fault Tree Analysis method. The findings provide the first steps in the establishment of recommendations for the upgrade of PSM systems to face events such as pandemics.

COVID-19 moral disengagement and prevention behaviors: The impact of perceived workplace COVID-19 safety climate and employee job insecurity

“…Moreover, even complex and safety critical industries are being managed from home as a result of the pandemic. Research (e.g., Ashraf et al, 2022 ) suggests that new challenges associated specifically with such remote work (e.g., poor quality of remote hazard identification, no remote working infrastructure, poor communication with remote workers, inadequate training on the use of remote working tools, etc.) may be leading to safety failures.…”

Failure Risk Assessment of Coal Gasifier Based on the Integration of Bayesian Network and Trapezoidal Intuitionistic Fuzzy Number-Based Similarity Aggregation Method (TpIFN-SAM)

“…Equipment-failure-risk assessment is a necessary means to clarify the safety status of the equipment and ensure the normal operation of the chemical systems. There are numerous risk-assessment methods available in process systems, one group of which is based on a combination of logical/probabilistic diagrams and deductive reasoning, such as fault-tree analysis (FTA), event-tree analysis (ETA), the bow-tie model (BT), and Bayesian networks (BNs), and are very widely used for risk and reliability analysis due to their intuitiveness, expressiveness, ease of analysis, and reasoning [2][3][4][5]. Of these, BN is suitable for modelling and analyzing complex systems and has gained much attention Processes 2022, 10, 1863 2 of 30 compared to others, since it can handle the occurrence of multi-state variables, express conditional dependencies among events, and allow for bidirectional reasoning to identify the most failure-prone links of the system better [6][7][8].…”

“…The main contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) This study attempts to propose an improved framework integrating intuitionistic fuzzy AHP, trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy number-based SAM, and a Bayesian network for failure-risk assessment of a coal gasifier. (2) This framework uses intuitionistic fuzzy AHP to assign the expert weights for reducing subjectivity or the bias caused by individual differences and obtains the likelihood of occurrence of root events in the BN through trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy numberbased SAM with experts' judgment. (3) This strategy can more convincingly translate the judgments of all experts into a clear probability value by an intuitionistic fuzzy reasoning approach, thus overcoming the difficulty of obtaining the basic probability data in the BN.…”

Strategic Innovation in Philanthropic Institutions to Reduce Poverty Due to the Impact of COVID-19

“…Data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) for 2020 explains that there has been an increase in the number of poor people from 24.79 million as of September 2019 to 27.55 million as of September 2020 [14]. The impact of this pandemic is also a severe challenge to the sustainability of the government and society [15].…”