Towards dynamic risk analysis: A review of the risk assessment approach and its limitations in the chemical process industry

Abstract

The objective of this review is to analyse the progress of Risk Assessment during the last decades and to offer an overview on its recent advancements and possible future direction for chemical and process industries. Despite the general approach of Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) is unchanged since its origin in the early 1980s, QRA has continuously evolved in different forms and its fields of application have enlarged significantly beyond process safety, where it has always been traditionally developed and used for chemical process industries. Now risk assessment techniques play a fundamental role in process design, implementation of safety systems, inspection and maintenance planning as well as operation management. Eventually risk assessment has become an essential tool for the development, continued operation and expansion of process installations. On the other hand, QRA limitations, such as its inability to update the risk picture, led to the development of several recent dynamic risk assessment approaches, whose methodological and applicative contributions are presented in this paper. This demonstrates that risk assessment is in continuous development; nevertheless, it still shows many challenges to face: the way forward is improving its preciseness and its capability to be dynamically updated, that it will be useful to support real-time decision-making.