Risk-Based Decision Making for the Management of Change in Process Plants: Benefits of Integrating Probabilistic and Phenomenological Analysis

Abstract

Management of changes in the work environment is recognized to be a fundamental part of the safety management, in particular for process plants. The approaches for change management usually entail a risk-based decision-making strategy, to verify if the modification of the process, equipment, or procedure can increase the prior level of risk. Usually the risk assessment in process plants is conducted through the quantitative risk assessment traditional techniques, based on consolidated techniques and widely accepted (as hazard and operability analysis, fault trees, etc.). However, they are static, hardly taking into account time-dependent events, and are carried out separately from the consequence analysis. In recent years, some dynamic risk assessment methodologies have been proposed, supported by process simulation. This paper shows an application of the methodology called integrated dynamic decision analysis, highlighting the benefits of integrating the logical-probabilistic modeling and the phenomenolo...