Risk Assessment of Coupled Hazardous Scenarios

Abstract

In a coupled domino effect, hazardous scenarios such as toxic release, VCE, and fire can simultaneously or sequentially occur. Chapters 2 and 3 only consider domino effects that are caused by fire or VCE. Therefore, this study develops a dynamic method called “Dynamic Graph Monte Carlo” (DGMC) to model the evolution of coupled domino effects and assess the vulnerability of humans and installations exposed to such scenarios. In the DGMC model, a chemical plant is represented by a system with multiple agents. The system consists of three types of agents: hazardous installations, ignition sources, and humans. Monte Carlo simulation is used to address the uncertainties in the evolution and interdependencies among the agents. By applying the developed algorithm, the death probability of humans and the failure probability of installations exposed to multiple possible hazardous scenarios can be obtained. Moreover, we can also obtain the possible evolution paths, evolution time nodes, and ignition times by using the developed model and algorithm.