Resilience assessment of chemical industrial areas during Natech-related cascading multi-hazards

Abstract

In chemical industrial areas, technological accidents triggered by natural events (Natech events) may escalate. Complex cascading multi-hazard scenarios with high uncertainties may be caused. Resilience is an essential property of a system to withstand and recover from disruptive events. The present study focuses on the change of the resilience level due to (possible) interactions between cascading hazards, chemical installations and safety barriers during the dynamic evolution of fire escalations triggered by a natural hazard (certain cascading multi-hazard scenarios). A quantitative resilience assessment method is developed to this end. The state transition of a system facing accidents in the context of resilience is explored. Moreover, the uncertainties accompanying an accident evolution are quantified using a Dynamic Bayesian Network, allowing a detailed analysis of the system performance in different time steps. System resilience is measured as a time-dependent function with respect to the change of system performance. The applicability of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by a case study, and the effects of different configurations of safety barriers on improving resilience are discussed. The results are valuable to support disaster prevention within chemical industrial areas.