Development of a New Strategy to Extract Dangerous Scenarios from Petrochemical Industry Installation

Abstract

The use of Petri net reachability graph remains one of the most popular methods to extract critical scenarios that lead the system to a dangerous state. However, in complex systems, explosion states space and confusion between causality and precedence relationship between events are the two major limits making reachability graph inefficient to perform such analysis. In the last decade, the first limitation was tackled by an approach that uses the Petri net structure. It considers only the last normal state and ignores the rest of the network. Nevertheless, no research work appears in the literature, to consider the second limitation. In this sense, this paper proposes a novel approach based on Petri net and linear logic, to overcome the two limits. To prove the effectiveness of this proposal, the approach was applied on a petrochemical installation consisting of a cooling flammable fluids storage bins system. The obtained results are compared with the two existing approaches, the first using reachability graph and the second using the Petri net structure. The new proposed approach has shown higher performances compared to the previously mentioned methods.