Major accidents in the chemical process industry occur with low frequency but may lead to severe damages affecting a myriad of stakeholders. Managing major accident risks of chemical industrial systems is regulated in the Seveso Directive of the European Union. However, the conventional risk assessment mainly focuses on the objective aspects of risks and lacks in incorporating public concerns and context-related issues. Aiming to overcome this limitation and enhance the public’s engagement and trust in risk assessment and management, the present study built an integrated risk index for ranking risks considering both technical aspects and societal concerns. A hypothetical case-study is used to demonstrate the application of the proposed risk index. At last, the outcomes of using the integrated risk index and the conventional risk assessment approach are compared and discussed.@en

Focusing on the effective configuration of emergency response systems in utility tunnels, this study proposes an innovative approach to optimize existing emergency response systems based on a consequence rapid prediction model and genetic algorithm. In the proposed approach, the interactions between different emergency response components are considered to perform a rapid gas dispersion prediction. Furthermore, the predicted gas concentration distribution is employed to estimate the quantitative explosion risks by combining the equivalent cloud method and the Baker-Strehlow model. Finally, the cumulative and cascading risk index are proposed and combined for systematic optimization by using a genetic algorithm. A case study is performed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. The results indicate that the optimized emergency response systems effectively reduce both the cumulative and cascading risk level. This study provides technical support for emergency response system design and helps to improve the safety-risk-control capabilities of utility tunnels.

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Chemical facilities face threats from accidental and intentional events, including the rising concern of cyber-physical (C2P) attacks in the digitized industrial control system era. Addressing major accident risks from safety hazards and C2P attacks requires an immediate unified framework for safety and security barrier management. This study presents a systematic risk-based approach to integrate conventional safety risks with emerging C2P attack risks. Adverse scenarios are identified, integrated into an attack-tree-bow-tie diagram, and modelled using a Bayesian network (BN). A vulnerability assessment model is developed to quantify industrial control system vulnerability to C2P attacks, considering uncertainties in attackers' knowledge levels. Monte Carlo simulations are used to handle uncertainty propagation in risk assessment, allowing the use of probability distributions for BN root nodes. Sensitivity analysis identifies critical factors/events, guiding the proposal of candidate strategies for barrier improvements. Combining cost-effectiveness analysis with a risk matrix yields the optimal strategy for safety and security barrier enhancements based on risk estimations. A hypothetical case study demonstrates the proposed approach's effectiveness in integrated safety and security barrier management, considering security vulnerability patching and safety barrier maintenance scheduling from a cost-effective perspective.@en

Chemical plants face safety hazards and security threats that may induce catastrophic scenarios. Safety and security barriers are employed widely to protect chemical plants from accidental and intentional undesired events and mitigate consequences. Managing safety and security barriers effectively and economically is a research topic with practical significance. The analysis of undesired event scenarios, including both accidental and intentional adverse scenarios, and assessing associated safety and security barriers are critical regarding cost-efficient barrier maintenance. This study proposes a novel approach for optimizing safety and security barrier maintenance strategy considering economic constraints. This approach consists of three steps: scenario building and barrier identification, barrier modeling, and determining optimal barrier maintenance intervals. In the proposed approach, accident scenarios in terms of safety and physical security are constructed using the extended bow-tie diagrams. After associated safety and security barriers are identified, a system simulation model is developed to conduct barrier modeling based on MATLAB/Simulink simulations, in which the barrier maintenance, the impacts of human and organizational barriers, and the correlations between barriers caused by shared components are considered. Finally, a combination of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and genetic algorithm (GA) is employed to support the decision-making on barrier maintenance optimization. An illustrative case is employed in this study to validate the feasibility of the proposed approach.@en

Natural gas pipeline construction is developing rapidly worldwide to meet the needs of international and domestic energy transportation. Meanwhile, leakage accidents occur to natural gas pipelines frequently due to mechanical failure, personal operation errors, etc., and induce huge economic property loss, environmental damages, and even casualties. However, few models have been developed to describe the evolution process of natural gas pipeline leakage accidents (NGPLA) and assess their corresponding consequences and influencing factors quantitatively. Therefore, this study aims to propose a comprehensive risk analysis model, named EDIB (ET-DEMATEL-ISM-BN) model, which can be employed to analyze the accident evolution process of NGPLA and conduct probabilistic risk assessments of NGPLA with the consideration of multiple influencing factors. In the proposed integrated model, event tree analysis (ET) is employed to analyze the evolution process of NGPLA before the influencing factors of accident evolution can be identified with the help of accident reports. Then, the combination of DEMATEL (Decision-making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) and ISM (Interpretative Structural Modeling) is used to determine the relationship among accident evolution events of NGPLA and obtain a hierarchical network, which can be employed to support the construction of a Bayesian network (BN) model. The prior conditional probabilities of the BN model were determined based on the data analysis of 773 accident reports or expert judgment with the help of the Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. Finally, the developed BN model was used to conduct accident evolution scenario analysis and influencing factor sensitivity analysis with respect to secondary accidents (fire, vapor cloud explosion, and asphyxia or poisoning). The results show that ignition is the most critical influencing factor leading to secondary accidents. The occurrence time and occurrence location of NGPLA mainly affect the efficiency of emergency response and further influence the accident consequence. Meanwhile, the weight ranking of economic loss, environmental influence, and casualties on social influence is determined with respect to NGPLAs.@en

Aligned with the development needs of Industry 4.0, industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPSs) are widely applied to chemical facilities to facilitate so-called intelligent production processes. Meanwhile, emerging cyber-to-physical (C2P) risks are introduced due to the vulnerability of ICPSs to cyberattacks. An integrated safety and security risk assessment of chemical facilities equipped with industrial cyber-physical systems becomes challenging, particularly in performing a probabilistic/quantitative risk assessment. Targeting this gap, this study develops a systematic approach to construct accident scenarios concerning both safety hazards and security threats and performs a probabilistic risk assessment of chemical facilities considering the interdependency between safety-associated events and security-associated events. In the proposed approach, bow-tie technique is used to perform a safety risk analysis, and meanwhile, the possible dangerous scenarios caused by physical attacks and C2P attacks are also identified and integrated into the bow-tie diagram. Particularly, attack impact modeling of C2P attacks helps to identify dangerous attack modes, and a time-to-compromise (TTC) based method is used to quantify the vulnerability of ICPSs to C2P attacks. Then, a Bayesian network (BN) model is developed to perform an integrated safety and security risk analysis. An illustrative case study is used in this study to give guidance on performing integrated safety and security risk assessment of ICPSs and validate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

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Domino accidents are typical low-frequency and high-consequence events in chemical process industries. Applying quantitative risk assessment (QRA) in domino accident assessment is challenging due to the uncertainties in the escalation process. Meanwhile, the outcomes of QRA are subject to a certain degree of unreliability due to the inappropriate representation of uncertainty. This paper reviews the literature in the field of QRA of domino accidents that may happen in the chemical process industries. Firstly, the sources of uncertainty in risk assessment of domino effects are identified and categorized based on a fundamental structure of uncertainty and a QRA framework. Furthermore, the current methodologies and approaches applied for handling various uncertainties (input uncertainty, model parameter uncertainty, and model structure uncertainty) in the QRA related to domino effects are reviewed. Based on the literature review results, current challenges with respect to uncertainty handling in QRA of domino accidents are discussed, and recommendations for future research are given before the conclusions are presented. This study helps researchers to get insights into the interface between uncertainty fundamentals and the QRA framework and the current status of uncertainty handling in the QRA of domino effects. Furthermore, this study promotes the development of new approaches for handling uncertainty in domino accident analysis.@en

An integrated approach for performance assessment and management of safety barriers in a systemic manner is needed concerning the prevention and mitigation of major accidents in chemical process industries. Particularly, the effects of safety barriers on system risk reduction should be assessed in a dynamic manner to support the decision-making on safety barrier establishments and improvements. A simulation approach, named Simulink-based Safety Barrier Modeling (SSBM), is proposed in this paper to conduct dynamic risk assessment of chemical facilities with the consideration of the degradation of safety barriers. The main functional features of the SSBM include i) the basic model structures of SSBM can be determined based on bow-tie diagrams, ii) multiple data (periodic proof test data, continuous condition-monitoring data, and accident precursor data) may be combined to update barrier failure probabilities and initiating event probabilities, iii) SSBM is able to handle uncertainty propagation in probabilistic risk assessment by using Monte Carlo simulations, and iv) cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and optimization algorithms are integrated to support the decision-making on safety barrier establishments and improvements. An illustrative case study is demonstrated to show the procedures of applying the SSBM on dynamic risk-informed safety barrier management and validate the feasibility of implementing the SSBM for cost-effective safety barrier optimization.@en

The frequent occurrence of various occupational accidents has resulted in significant casualties and occupational disease issues, which hinder economic and social development seriously. The promotion and enhancement of occupational health and safety (OHS) require greater efforts to be made to achieve sustainable economic development, particularly in developing countries. With remarkable progress and achievements that have been made in terms of OHS in China, a systematic and thorough review is needed to gain insight into the development process, current status, and research trends regarding OHS in China. Additionally, pathways for future work need to be discussed to boost the OHS development in China in the new era. Therefore, a systematic literature review is performed in this study to investigate the development of OHS in China with the help of a bibliometric analysis. Firstly, a total of 5675 publications related to OHS in China between 1979 and 2022 were collected from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) and the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD) before being refined manually. Then, the temporal distribution and journal sources of the collected publications were analyzed before the collaboration networks of the “productive institutions” and “productive authors” were discussed. Furthermore, the key research topics (e.g., disease prevention, psychological safety, occupational exposure) and dominant research methods (e.g., epidemiological methods, risk modeling) associated with OHS during different periods were identified and discussed based on the keywords and bibliographic analysis. Finally, the current needs and promising pathways for future work were discussed. It is suggested that the prevention and control of conventional and new occupational diseases, the protection of workers’ occupational health rights and interests, the development and implementation of advanced technologies for OHS, and the development of more sophisticated and efficient health and safety risk assessment models may be focused on to accelerate the development of OHS in China. This study systematically reviews the development processes, current status, and future prospects regarding OHS in China. The results of this study provide valuable insights for researchers and practitioners who are involved in the Chinese OHS development, and the promising pathways for future works are suggested to boost the OHS development in China.@en

Targeting the challenges in the risk analysis of laboratory fire accidents, particularly considering fire accidents in Chinese universities, an integrated approach is proposed with the combination of association rule learning, a Bayesian network (BN), and fuzzy set theory in this study. The proposed approach has the main advantages of deriving conditional probabilities of BN nodes based on historical accident data and association rules (ARs) and making good use of expert elicitation by using an augmented fuzzy set method. In the proposed approach, prior probabilities of the cause nodes are determined based on expert elicitation with the help of an augmented fuzzy set method. The augmented fuzzy set method enables the effective aggregation of expert opinions and helps to reduce subjective bias in expert elicitations. Additionally, an AR algorithm is applied to determine the probabilistic dependency between the BN nodes based on the historical accident data of Chinese universities and further derive conditional probability tables. Finally, the developed fuzzy Bayesian network (FBN) model was employed to identify critical causal factors with respect to laboratory fire accidents in Chinese universities. The obtained results show that H4 (bad safety awareness), O1 (improper storage of hazardous chemicals), E1 (environment with hazardous materials), and M4 (inadequate safety checks) are the four most critical factors inducing laboratory fire accidents.@en

As an effective way to facilitate the increasing demand for reliable infrastructure, energy supply and sustainable urban development, underground utility tunnels have been developed rapidly in recent years. Due to the widespread distribution of utility tunnels, the safe operation of natural gas pipelines accommodated in utility tunnels has caused great concern considering fire, explosion, and other coupling consequences induced by the gas pipeline leakage. However, the limited information on leakage source terms in accidental leakage scenarios could preclude timely consequence assessment and effective emergency response. In this study, a BI-IEnKF coupling source term estimation (STE) model is developed, with the combination of gas dispersion model, Bayesian inference (BI) and iterative ensemble Kalman filter (IEnKF) method, to achieve the effective source term estimation (including leakage location and leakage rate) and gas concentration distribution prediction. The newly developed model is first evaluated by the twin experiment with good reliability and accuracy. Furthermore, three contributing factors affecting the performance of the developed BI-IEnKF coupling STE model were investigated to assist parameter selection for practical use. Additionally, the novel application of mobile sensors serving as an alternative for fixed sensors is explored, and an application framework is sequentially given to guide the deployment of the developed coupling model in utility tunnels. The results show that the developed model has great performance in accuracy, efficiency and robustness, as well as the potential to be applied in actual utility tunnel scenarios. This study can provide technical supports for safety control and emergency response in the case of natural gas pipeline leakage accidents in utility tunnels. Also, it could be helpful to reasonable references for gas lekage monitoring system design.@en

Toxic gas leakage represents a type of major process accident scenario threatening human life. Technical and non-technical safety barriers are employed to prevent toxic gas leakage accidents or mitigate the possible catastrophic consequences. Evacuation must be executed in severe toxic gas release scenarios. The performance assessment of technical safety barriers and evacuations in these accident scenarios, although very important, has never been investigated in previous studies. This paper proposes an approach integrating event tree analysis (ETA), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, and evacuation modeling (EM), for risk assessment of toxic gas leakage accidents in chemical plants. In the proposed approach, the spatiotemporal distribution of toxic gas is predicted by CFD simulations. A dynamic evacuation is determined by a cellular automaton (CA)-based model. Synergistic interventions resulting from technical safety barriers and evacuations are considered in the risk assessment. Considering safety barrier failures in the event tree analysis, individual fatality risks due to toxic gas leakage scenarios are calculated. For illustrative purposes, the proposed method is applied to a case of ammonia leakage. The results show that worse scenarios would be ignored without considering the failure probabilities of technical safety barriers, which can cause underestimated individual fatality risks. Timely gas detection & alarm has the potential to expedite the starting time of evacuations and thus may shorten the time that evacuees stay in the toxicity area to reduce individual fatality risks.@en

Data uncertainties caused by the lack of knowledge and nature variation or randomness present vital challenges to domino effects modelling. To improve the assessment of the propagation probabilities and consequences of the domino-effect accidents, the influence of various types of uncertainties on risk assessment results needs to be investigated. However, a systematic identification of data uncertainties in domino effects has not been studied yet. In the current study, the data uncertainties in different categories (accidental, Natech, and intentional) of domino events are identified thoroughly based on historical data and literature. Meanwhile, the possible sources of the identified uncertainties are analysed by considering the environment, safety management, and operation factors. Finally, we discuss possible solutions to model uncertainties in risk assessments of domino effects. This study is a pilot study for uncertainty analysis and helps to identify the critical uncertainties that are of necessity to be considered in the domino effect risk assessments. @en

Barriers are used in various forms to assure the safety of chemical plants. A deep understanding of the literature related to safety barriers is essential to tackle the challenges in improving their design and management. This paper first provides an overview of the history of the development of the safety barrier concept. Subsequently, this paper elaborates a systematic review of the definition, classification, evaluation, performance assessment, and management of safety barriers in the chemical process industries. Based on the literature review, this study proposes a practical classification of safety barriers benefiting the identification of performance indicators and the collection of indicator-related data for safety barriers. The safety barrier functions are extended and illustrated by involving the resilience concept. Performance assessment criteria are proposed corresponding to the adaptability and recoverability of the safety barriers. Finally, the management of safety barriers is discussed. The roadmap for future studies to develop integrated management of safety and security barriers to ensure the resilience of chemical plants is suggested.@en

Chemical process industries are threatened with accidental and intentional adverse events because of the storage and operation of large quantities of hazardous substances. Safety and security barriers play important roles in protecting the chemical plants from safety and security-related undesired events and mitigating the potentially catastrophic consequences. Aiming to identify major accident scenarios in terms of both safety and security and determine the corresponding safety and security barriers, a novel approach based on MIMAH (methodology for identifying major accident hazards) and historical data analysis is proposed. In this approach, the MIMAH is extended to identify accident scenarios related to safety, physical security, and cyber security by using a combination of bow-tie analysis and attack tree analysis. Then, data analysis is conducted to supplement the identified major accident scenarios before the critical safety and security barriers can be identified and illustrated based on an integrated bow-tie and attack tree model. This study helps to identify major hazards considering both safety and security perspectives and supports the integrated assessment and management of safety and security barriers in the chemical process industries. @en

This study aims to characterize the whole reaction process of (i) emulsion explosive matrix and sulfide ores, and (ii) ammonium nitrate and pyrite by the thermodynamics analysis method. A series of experiments were carried out at atmospheric pressure from 25 °C to 350 °C at four heating rates (3, 5, 10, and 15 K/min) and the Coats–Redfern method was applied to calculate the apparent activation energy of samples at different heating rates. The results show that the thermogravimetric (TG) curve of sulfide ores and emulsion explosive matrix can be divided into four stages: the water evaporation stage, the dynamic balance stage, the thermal decomposition stage, and the extinguishment stage. However, the thermal decomposition process of ammonium nitrate and pyrite can be divided into the dynamic balance stage, the thermal decomposition stage, and the burnout stage. The ignition temperature (T0) and maximum peak temperature (Tm) of the samples increased with the heating rate, but the shape of the TG/DTG (Derivative Thermogravimetric) curve was not affected. The results show that the reaction process of sulfide ores and emulsion explosive matrix is similar to the reaction process of pyrite and ammonium nitrate. The thermal stability of emulsion explosive matrix decreases when sulfide ores are added. By contrast, when pyrite is added, the thermal stability of the ammonium nitrate decreases more significantly.@en

Crime issues have been attracting widespread attention from citizens and managers of cities due to their unexpected and massive consequences. As an effective technique to prevent and control urban crimes, the data-driven spatial–temporal crime prediction can provide reasonable estimations associated with the crime hotspot. It thus contributes to the decision making of relevant departments under limited resources, as well as promotes civilized urban development. However, the deficient performance in the aspect of the daily spatial–temporal crime prediction at the urban-district-scale needs to be further resolved, which serves as a critical role in police resource allocation. In order to establish a practical and effective daily crime prediction framework at an urban police-district-scale, an “online” integrated graph model is proposed. A residual neural network (ResNet), graph convolutional network (GCN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) are integrated with an attention mechanism in the proposed model to extract and fuse the spatial–temporal features, topological graphs, and external features. Then, the “online” integrated graph model is validated by daily theft and assault data within 22 police districts in the city of Chicago, US from 1 January 2015 to 7 January 2020. Additionally, several widely used baseline models, including autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), ridge regression, support vector regression (SVR), random forest, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), LSTM, convolutional neural network (CNN), and Conv-LSTM models, are compared with the proposed model from a quantitative point of view by using the same dataset. The results show that the predicted spatial–temporal patterns by the proposed model are close to the observations. Moreover, the integrated graph model performs more accurately since it has lower average values of the mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) than the other eight models. Therefore, the proposed model has great potential in supporting the decision making for the police in the fields of patrolling and investigation, as well as resource allocation.@en

As a kind of critical infrastructure of energy transportation, so-called ‘utility tunnels’ have been developed around the world. Hosting a natural gas pipeline inside the natural gas compartment of a utility tunnel facilitates its maintenance but also brings potential explosion concerns due to the confined space. Although some work focuses on the risk analysis of the natural gas pipeline inside utility tunnels, a resilience assessment is needed for dynamically modeling leakage with interacting safety barriers. In this paper, a resilience assessment model of the natural gas compartment of utility tunnels is elaborated based on numerical simulation considering interacting barrier modeling, including sensors, a ventilation system, and the possibility of emergency shutdown. Based on the calculated (natural gas compartment) resilience for casualty and economic loss, ventilation strategies and sensor layouts can be recommended and optimization is possible. Meanwhile, the delay effect of safety barriers is investigated in this work, and the unequal interval layouts of sensors are explored and proven to be effective without any further cost. The proposed resilience assessment model can be important to further improve the safety management of utility tunnels and other confined spaces where hazardous gases are transported.@en

Safety and security barriers are implemented in various forms to protect chemical plants from undesired accidents and mitigate the disastrous consequences. However, the necessity and rationality of integrating safety and security barriers need to be investigated, and the difficulty in integrated management of safety and security barriers is still a challenge. In this study, the research status of integrated safety and security barrier management are reviewed before the necessity, and theoretical ground for integrating security and safety barriers are elaborated. Then, a unified classification of safety and security barriers is proposed to benefit the collection of performance indicator-related data and further support the performance assessment of safety and security barriers. Finally, a framework for integrated management of safety and security barriers is suggested to support the integrated management of safety and security barriers.

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