Extracting spatial patterns of urban gas pipeline risk considering social and structural parameters of urban blocks

Abstract

Due to growing cities and urbanization, the demand for natural gas is increasing rapidly around the world. To address this necessity, the density of urban natural gas pipelines will increase. However, urban pipelines pass through regions with the high density of people and buildings with low construction quality, possibly leading to accidents that may cause extreme damage to people and property. In this paper, a quantitative method is proposed for evaluation of hazards that are influenced by the inherent parameters of gas pipelines considering their density. Afterwards, considering the physical and social vulnerabilities of this study area, the structural and social parameters of urban blocks are added to the risk model. The output of this method is used to analyze the risk of spatial patterns of urban natural gas pipelines and the structural and social parameters of urban blocks. This research model consists of the following three main sections: hazard mapping of urban gas pipelines considering their inherent parameters, physical and social vulnerability mapping of urban blocks, and risk mapping of gas pipelines. The results show that there are meaningful spatial patterns in risk distributions that can be analyzed by the vulnerability results. The output of the proposed method has many applications in the fields of disaster management, urban planning and incident prediction.