A virtual experiment for measuring system resilience: a case of chemical process systems

Abstract

Resilience is an emergent property of a system, which changes with various internal and external factors. Resilience is also a hidden property of a system that cannot be observed. Thus, experiments should be performed for a given system to measure its resilience. However, physical experiments are practically impossible. Inspired by the tensile test for the stress-strain curve in Material Science, this paper proposes a virtual experiment for measuring system resilience and applies it to a chemical process system. The physical parameters of system resilience of a process system are mapped to those of material resilience. A process system is viewed as a 'specimen' in this experiment. The system performance variation caused by disruptions is seen as the displacement of the specimen caused by the applied load. In absorption phase, the decrease speed of system performance is determined by the failure rate of components under disruptive condition. Response time, including fault diagnosis time and resource allocation time, is used to represent adaptation ability. Restoration ability depends on repair rate of components. For simplicity purpose, the proposed method is applied to resilience assessment of a release prevention barrier system used in the Chevron Richmond refinery crude unit and its associated upstream process.