Risk analysis of offshore terminals in the Caspian Sea

Abstract

Nowadays in offshore industry there are emerging hazards with vague property such as act of terrorism, act of war, unforeseen natural disasters such as tsunami, etc. Therefore industry professionals such as offshore energy insurers, safety engineers and risk managers in order to determine the failure rates and frequencies for the potential hazards where there is no data available, they need to use an appropriate method to overcome this difficulty. Furthermore in conventional risk based analysis models such as when using a fault tree analysis, hazards with vague properties are normally waived and ignored. In other word in previous situations only a traditional probability based fault tree analysis could be implemented. To overcome this shortcoming fuzzy set theory is applied to fault tree analysis to combine the known and unknown data in which the pre-combined result will be determined under a fuzzy environment. This has been fulfilled by integration of a generic bow-tie based risk analysis model into the risk assessment phase of the Risk Management (RM) cycles as a backbone of the phase. For this reason Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Event Tree Analysis (ETA) are used to analyse one of the significant risk factors associated in offshore terminals. This process will eventually help the insurers and risk managers in marine and offshore industries to investigate the potential hazards more in detail if there is vagueness. For this purpose a case study of offshore terminal while coinciding with the nature of the Caspian Sea was decided to be examined.