An integrated framework of safety performance evaluation for oil and gas production plants: Application to a petroleum transportation station

Abstract

Safety performance evaluation is a significant way to ensure the safety of oil and gas production plants. Various evaluation methods have been proposed to make safety evaluation more consistent and scientific. However, a major concern is that many existing safety evaluation measurements are still subjective and are not easy to obtain in a uniform way, which can be attributed to the challenges that process plants faced such as people having different knowledge levels, equipment with dispersed locations and management with many processes. This paper aims to display the impact of risk factors on system safety level in a succinct and visual way that may be expected to overcome subjective opinions from experts and provide a more pertinent and practical safety strategies. To this end, an integrated framework is developed, which considers crucial risk factors from pipeline, static equipment, dynamic equipment and management. First, Fault tree analysis (FTA) is used to explicitly determine the crucial r risk factors. Then, a novel fuzzy cognitive map cooperating with relative degree analysis model (FCM-RDA) is proposed to deal with the weigh distribution opinions. Finally, considering the oil and gas production process is a complex system, a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) is employed to calculate the overall safety level.