Operational Risk Assessment and Management of Process Operations

摘要

Processes involving hazardous operations may potentially cause catastrophic consequences.In spite of using numerous end-of-the-pipe safety systems, tragic accidents such as Texas City refinery, Richmond refinery still continue to occur.One of the main reasons of such rare but catastrophic events occurrence is lack of effective monitoring and modeling approaches that provide early warnings and help to prevent, control or at least mitigate such accidents.There are many methods to assess the risk of accident scenarios in thefacility.Each method consists of different steps and follows a specific procedure.Accident probability estimation is a common and central step to all these methods.Probability of low frequency high consequence accidents is not well supported by conventional statistical methods due to data scarcity.Thus, accident precursor analysis has been proposed as effective method to deal with such accidents.This presentation discusses details of operational risk assessment using early warnings often termed as accident precursors.Operational accident scenarios are modeled using Bow-tie approach.Real time operation data is used to update the failure probabilities of key elements is operation.Updated probabilities are integrated with potential consequents to assess real time operation risk.The usefulness of risk assessment methodology is demonstrated using case study.