A dynamic Bayesian networks modeling of human factors on offshore blowouts

An application of dynamic Bayesian networks for quantitative risk assessment of human factors on offshore blowouts is presented. Human error is described using human factor barrier failure (HFBF), which consists of three categories of factors, including individual factor barrier failure (IFBF), organizational factor barrier failure (OFBF) and group factor barrier failure (GFBF). The structure of human factors is illustrated using pseudo-fault tree, which is defined by incorporating the intermediate options into fault tree in order to eliminate the binary restriction. A methodology of translating pseudo-fault tree into Bayesian networks and dynamic Bayesian networks taking repair into consideration is proposed and the propagation is performed. The results show that the human factor barrier failure probability only increases within the first two weeks and rapidly reaches a stable level when the repair is considered, whereas it increases continuously when the repair action is not considered. The results of mutual information show that the important degree sequences for the three categories of human factors on HFBF are: GFBF, OFBF and IFBF. In addition, each individual human factor contributes different to the HFBF, those which contribute much should given more attention in order to improve the human reliability and prevent the potential accident occurring.     

An integrated methodology to manage risk factors of aging urban oil and gas pipelines

Aging urban oil and gas pipelines have a high failure probability due to their structural degradation and external interference. The operational safety of the aging urban oil and gas pipeline is challenged by different hazards. This paper proposes a novel methodology by integrating an index-based risk evaluation system and fuzzy TOPSIS model for risk management of aging urban oil and gas pipelines, and it is carried out by evaluating the priority of hazards affecting pipeline safety. Firstly, the hazard factors of aging urban oil and gas pipelines are identified to establish an index-based risk evaluation system. Subsequently, the fuzzy TOPSIS model is employed to evaluate the importance of these hazard factors and to decide which factors should be managed with priority. This work measures the importance of a hazard factor from three aspects, i.e. occurrence (O), severity (S) and detectability (D), and the weights of these three parameters are determined by a combination weight method. Eventually, the proposed methodology is tested by an industrial case to illustrate its effectiveness, and some safety strategies to reduce the operational risk of the pipeline are presented. The proposed methodology is a useful tool to implement more efficient risk management of aging urban oil and gas pipelines.     

Evaluation of the Risk OMT model for maintenance work on major offshore process equipment

Operational safety is receiving more and more attention in the Norwegian offshore industry. Almost two thirds of all leaks on offshore installations in the period 2001–2005, according to the Risk Level Project by the Petroleum Safety Authority in Norway, resulted from manual operations and interventions, as well as shut-down and start-up. The intention with the Risk OMT (risk modelling – integration of organisational, human and technical factors) program has been to develop more representative models for calculation of leak frequencies as a function of the volume of manual operations and interventions. In the Risk OMT project a generic risk model has been developed and is adapted to use for specific failure scenarios. The model considers the operational barriers in event trees and fault trees, as well as risk influencing factors that determine the basic event probabilities in the fault trees. The full model, which applies Bayesian belief networks, is presented more thoroughly in a separate paper. This paper presents the evaluation of the model. The model has been evaluated through some case studies, and one important aspect is the evaluation of the importance of each risk influencing factor. In addition some risk-reducing measures have been proposed, and the paper presents how the effect of these measures has been evaluated by using the model. Finally, possible applications and recommendations for further work are discussed.     

Risk assessment of safety level in university laboratories using questionnaire and Bayesian network

Accidents in university laboratories not only create a great threat to students’ safety but bring significant negative social impact. This paper investigates the university laboratory safety in China using questionnaire and Bayesian network (BN) analysis. Sixteen influencing factors for building the Bayesian net were firstly identified. A questionnaire was distributed to graduate students at 60 universities in China to acquire the probability of safe/unsafe conditions for sixteen influencing factors, based on which the conditional probability of four key factors (human, equipment and material, environment, and management) was calculated using the fuzzy triangular theory and expert judgment. The determined conditional probability was used to develop a Bayesian network model for the risk analysis of university laboratory safety and identification of the main reasons behind the accidents. Questionnaire results showed that management problems are prominent due to insufficient safety education training and weak management level of management personnel. The calculated unsafe state probability was found to be 65.2%. In the BN analysis, the human factor was found to play the most important role, followed by equipment and material factor. Sensitive and inferential analysis showed that the most sensitive factors are personnel incorrect operation, illegal operation, and experiment equipment failure. Based on the analysis, countermeasures were proposed to improve the safe management and operation of university laboratories.     

Safety study of an LNG regasification plant using an FMECA and HAZOP integrated methodology

A safety analysis was performed to determine possible accidental events in the storage system used in the liquefied natural gas regasification plant using the integrated application of failure modes, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) and hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP) methodologies. The goal of the FMECA technique is the estimation of component failure modes and their major effects, whereas HAZOP is a structured and systematic technique that provides an identification of the hazards and the operability problems using logical sequences of cause-deviation-consequence of process parameters. The proposed FMECA and HAZOP integrated analysis (FHIA) has been designed as a tool for the development of specific criteria for reliability and risk data organisation and to gain more recommendations than those typically provided by the application of a single methodology. This approach has been applied to the risk analysis of the LNG storage systems under construction in Porto Empedocle, Italy. The results showed that FHIA is a useful technique to better and more consistently identify the potential sources of human errors, causal factors in faults, multiple or common cause failures and correlation of cause-consequence of hazards during the various steps of the process.     

A fuzzy multi-attribute model for risk evaluation in workplaces

Risk assessment constitutes a critical phase of the safety management process. It basically consists of evaluating the risks involved in the execution of working activities, so as to provide the managers with information suitable to address intervention measures. The most important activity in risk assessment is the risk evaluation task but, despite its importance, national and international regulations have never formalized a standard methodology for addressing it, leaving companies complete freedom to adopt the approach they consider appropriate. As a consequence, companies generally settle on the use of simple methodologies which frequently are not able to emphasize all the main aspects affecting risk in the workplace and to produce a precise ranking of hazardous activities. In this paper, a new methodology for risk evaluation is then proposed with the aim to overcome limitations of the classical approaches. In particular, new factors are introduced to take into account effects of human behavior and environment on risk level, other than the classical injury magnitude and occurrence probability of an accident. The proposed methodology also integrates an estimative approach based on the fuzzy logic theory, which permits more coherence in the evaluation process, producing a very suitable final rank of hazardous activities. Finally, an actual case study is reported to show the capabilities of the new risk evaluation model.     

Mitigation of operational failures via an economic framework of reliability,availability, and maintainability (RAM) during conceptual design

Abnormal process situation may lead to tremendous negative impact on sustainability, wellbeing of workers and adjacent communities, company's profit, and stability of supply chains. Failure of equipment and process subsystems are among the primary causes of abnormal situations. The conventional approach in handling failure-based abnormal situations has usually focused on operational strategies. Such an approach overlooks the critical role of process design in mitigating failure, while simultaneously considering the effects of such failure on process economic performance. The aim of this work is to introduce a systematic methodology that accounts for failure early enough during the conceptual design stages. Once a base-case design is developed, the methodology starts by identifying the sources of failure that are caused by reliability issues including equipment, operational procedures, and human errors for a given process system or subsystem. This allows for the identification of critical process subsystem(s) that are more failure-prone or cause greater downtime than other subsystems. Bayesian updating and Monte Carlo techniques are utilized to determine the appropriate distributions for the failure and repair scenario(s), respectively, in question. Markov analysis is used to determine the system availability. Next, the process revenue is described as a function of inherent availability. The effects of failures are incorporated into profitability calculations to establish an economic framework for trading off failure and profitability. In the proposed framework, the economic potential of alternative design scenarios is evaluated and an optimization formulation with the objective of maximizing incremental return on investment (IROI) is utilized to make a design decision. A case study on an ethylene plant is solved to demonstrate the applicability and value of the proposed approach.     

Assessment of the effect of technical and management characteristics on the frequency of release from piping: An application to a gas storage facility

The assessment of the frequencies of release from piping due to losses of containment is an essential step in the preparing Safety Reports, drawn up as required by the so-called “Seveso” Directive. These are usually calculated starting from the frequencies of random rupture included in international databases and are not plant-specific, furthermore, the quantification of the effect of the safety management system of the facility is not easy. A simple and flexible approach quantifying technical and management characteristics of the plant has been proposed by Milazzo and co-workers in 2010; it is based on the modification of the frequency taken from literature, through the use of the percentages of failure causes actually possible in that plant, and the judgment about their management. The data about the failure causes are taken from the literature and modified by using corrective factors to adapt them to the industrial context. To make possible the application of the method to a large number of major-hazard industry types, some aspects of the approach needed to be improved; these have been identified during a development project coordinated by RINA Consulting, on behalf of Saipem, with the collaboration of the University of Messina. The improvement of the approach focused on two main points, the development of a method to calculate the corrective factors for the failure causes associated with corrosion and erosion phenomena and the strengthening of the methodology for the formulation of the judgment about the safety management. This paper illustrates the fully improved method, as well as an application to a typical gas storage plant.     

水平定向钻穿越施工的失效可能性研究

水平定向钻穿越施工是管道穿越工程的一种主要施工形式,在施工中由于地质条件、设备使用和穿越工艺选择等原因使其存在风险,因此有必要对其失效可能性进行研究。建立了包含“人、机、料、法、环”五方面的水平定向钻施工失效可能性指标评价体系,对于特征影响因素,如扩径比、管土摩擦系数等,运用回拖过程的力学分析得出其分布规律,用模糊化的方法将底层指标分值转化为先验概率,再代入贝叶斯网络进行概率推理,最终确定其失效可能性。以某管道工程采取水平定向钻穿越河流为例,得出其失效可能性等级为“较高”,最后提出了相应的控制措施。运用贝叶斯网络研究水平定向钻穿越施工的失效可能性具有重要的工程应用价值和现实意义。     

Method to assess and optimise dependability of complex macro-systems: Application to a railway signalling system

Achieving a high degree of dependability in complex macro-systems is challenging. Because of the large number of components and numerous independent teams involved, an overview of the global system performance is usually lacking to support both design and operation adequately.A functional failure mode, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) approach is proposed to address the dependability optimisation of large and complex systems. The basic inductive model FMECA has been enriched to include considerations such as operational procedures, alarm systems, environmental and human factors, as well as operation in degraded mode. Its implementation on a commercial software tool allows an active linking between the functional layers of the system and facilitates data processing and retrieval, which enables to contribute actively to the system optimisation.The proposed methodology has been applied to optimise dependability in a railway signalling system. Signalling systems are typical example of large complex systems made of multiple hierarchical layers. The proposed approach appears appropriate to assess the global risk- and availability-level of the system as well as to identify its vulnerabilities. This enriched-FMECA approach enables to overcome some of the limitations and pitfalls previously reported with classical FMECA approaches.     

基于因子交互作用矩阵的采空区危险度评价研究

基于因子交互作用影响矩阵及采空区危险度影响因子分析,选取12个采空区危险度主要影响因子,建立采空区危 险度多因子交互作用矩阵模型。通过专家打分法,确定各影响因子相互作用权值,得到影响矩阵对单一因子的影响值及 单一因子对矩阵系统的影响值,从而得出采空区危险度因子影响权重表。分析影响权重表,得到对采空区影响最大的因 子为矿柱尺寸及分布和岩体断裂及破损带。采用差值法,对采空区危险度进行等级划分,最后得到采空区危险度分级图 。经过实例验证,影响矩阵法分析评价结果与实际吻合,表明采用影响矩阵法评价采空区危险度是可行的,具有实际应用 意义,可在实际矿山工程中应用推广。     

Identifying critical success factors in emergency management using a fuzzy DEMATEL method

Since unexpected natural disasters have been causing enormous losses all over the world, emergency management is receiving more and more attention recently. However, most existing studies generally focus on optimization models of specific activities instead of studying the system as a whole. Moreover, the performance of emergency management may be affected by various different factors and it is always difficult for the practitioners to improve all aspects at the same time. In view of the constraint of resources, this paper brings forward an imperative issue on how to enhance emergency management by segmenting complex influencing factors into groups to improve them in a stepwise way. To address this concern involving the vagueness of human judgments, an effective method that combines fuzzy logic and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is used. Considering the interdependence among factors, this fuzzy DEMATEL method forms a structural model and then visualizes the causal relationships among factors through a cause-effect relationship diagram. Then according to the results of proposed method, critical success factor (CSF) of emergency management is figured out. Finally, 5 CSFs are identified out of 20 influencing factors, and all factors can be achieved in a stepwise way for better promoting the effectiveness and efficiency of emergency management.     

Corrosion failure probability analysis of buried gas pipelines based on subset simulation

Corrosion is the main reason for the failure of buried gas pipelines. For effective corrosion failure probability analysis, the structural reliability theory was adopted in this study to establish two calculation models for pipeline corrosion failure: the pressure failure model and von Mises stress failure model. Then, two calculation models for the corrosion failure probability were established based on a corrosion depth growth model obtained from actual survey data of soil corrosion characteristics. In an example, Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) and subset simulation (SS) were used to analyze the corrosion failure probability of pipelines, and the results were compared. SS can compensate for the shortcomings of MCS as it has higher computational efficiency and accuracy. Therefore, SS was adopted to simulate variations in the corrosion failure probability of buried pipelines with the service time for the two failure probability calculation models, which were applied to a natural gas pipeline located in a chemical industry park in Zhuhai, China. A sensitivity analysis was carried out on the relevant parameters that affect the failure probability. The results showed that multiple loads caused by the covering soil, residual stress, temperature differential, and bending stress have a non-negligible effect on the pipeline reliability. The corrosion coefficients gradually become the most important factors that affect the failure probability with increased service time. The proposed methodology considers the actual operating conditions of pipelines to provide a reliable theoretical basis for integrity management.     

Emission factor estimation for oil and gas facilities

Fugitive emission rate quantification in an oil and gas facility is an important step of risk management. There are several studies conducted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and American Petroleum Institute (API) proposing methods of estimating emission rates and factors. Four major approaches of estimating these emissions, in the order of their accuracy, are: average emission factor approach, screening ranges emission factor approach, USEPA correlation equation approach, and unit-specific correlation equation approach. The focus of this study is to optimize the USEPA correlation equations to estimate the emission rate of different units in an oil and gas facility. In the developed methodology, the data available from USEPA (1995) is used to develop new sets of equations. A comparison between USEPA correlation equations and the proposed equations is performed to define the optimum sets of equations. It is observed that for pumps, flanges, open-ended lines, and others, the proposed developed equations provide a better estimation of emission rate, whereas for other sources, USEPA equations supply the better estimate of emission rate.     

Availability organisational analysis: Is it a hazard for safety?

This main issue of this article analyses the possible way to use for availability improvement, the organisational analysis methodology initially developed for accident safety investigations. As the last decade examples in the industrial world prove that some organisational weaknesses could either impact safety or availability, we have for purpose to make some important clarifications, with the help of the organisational paradigm, and grounded on our knowledge of safety accidents or local inquiries in hazardous technical complex systems.We will first give our definition of an availability event, by comparison with a safety event and recall what is for us an organisational analysis. Then we will consider the safety organisational paradigm pathogenic factors in wondering if these factors could also be seen as pathogenic factors for availability; or if specific availability pathogenic factors can be inferred from these safety pathogenic factors.In the end we will try to assess the common points and the differences between an availability oriented organisational analysis and a safety oriented one, with a particular attention to possible negative follows-up on safety issues and to the methodology issue.     

Macroergonomic Analysis and Design for Improved Safety and Quality Performance

Abstract

Macroergonomics, which emerged historically after sociotechnical systems theory, quality management, and ergonomics, is presented as the basis for a needed integrative methodology. A macroergonomics methodology was presented in some detail to demonstrate how aspects of microergonomics, total quality management (TQM), and sociotechnical systems (STS) can be triangulated in a common approach, in the context of this methodology, quality and safety were presented as 2 of several important performance criteria. To demonstrate aspects of the methodology, 2 case studies were summarized with safety and quality performance results where available. The first case manipulated both personnel and technical factors to achieve a “safety culture” at a nuclear site. The concept of safety culture is defined in INSAG-4 (International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991). as “that assembly of characteristics and attitudes in organizations and individuals which establishes that, as an overriding priority, nuclear plant safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance.” The second case described a tire manufacturing intervention to improve quality (as defined by Sink and Tuttle, 1989) through joint consideration of technical and social factors. It was suggested that macroergonomics can yield greater performance than can be achieved through ergonomic intervention alone. Whereas case studies help to make the case, more rigorous formative and summative research is needed to refine and validate the proposed methodology respectively.     

Risk-based maintenance (RBM): a quantitative approach for maintenance/inspection scheduling and planning

The overall objective of the maintenance process is to increase the profitability of the operation and optimize the total life cycle cost without compromising safety or environmental issues. Risk assessment integrates reliability with safety and environmental issues and therefore can be used as a decision tool for preventive maintenance planning. Maintenance planning based on risk analysis minimizes the probability of system failure and its consequences (related to safety, economic, and environment). It helps management in making correct decisions concerning investment in maintenance or related field. This will, in turn, result in better asset and capital utilization.

This paper presents a new methodology for risk-based maintenance. The proposed methodology is comprehensive and quantitative. It comprises three main modules: risk estimation module, risk evaluation module, and maintenance planning module. Details of the three modules are given. A case study, which exemplifies the use of methodology to a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system, is also discussed.     

基于多因素分析的玻璃行业员工不安全行为研究

采用问卷调查、信效度分析和因子分析等方法,研究玻璃行业不安全行为影响因素,研究结果表明：玻璃行业员工不安全行为主要包括车间照明、PPE佩戴等18个影响因素指标;根据方差分析结果将影响因素归结为工作环境与行为要求（F₁）、安全教育与培训（F₂）、群体与组织行为影响（F₃）和激励沟通与奖惩（F₄）等4个主因子,其方差解释率分别为32%、12%、10%、10%,权重分别为0.51、0.19、0.15、0.15;根据分析结果针对性提出“4+1”安全管理模式,为玻璃行业降低不安全行为几率、保障安全生产提供理论依据。     

Using an expanded Safety Failure Event Network to analyze railway dangerous goods transportation system risk-accident

In order to improve the reliability and safety of railway dangerous goods transportation system (RDGTS), and prevent the similar accidents happened again, an easier operated, dynamic, systemic and quantitative approach called expanded Safety Failure Event Network (SFEN) is proposed to analyze the past typical RDGTS accidents. The expanded SFEN focuses on transfer the traditional safety occurrence process into a visible Accident Analysis Network (AAN) platform. To improve the previous SFEN approach, the risk factors categories are expanded including Human actions, Technical failure, Nature of transported goods, Environment factors, Management failure and External factors of the system. An AAN is established by using the risk factors as the nodes and using the interactions among these risk factors as the edges, the RDGTS risk analysis problem is transferred into a quantitative network structure analysis problem from a network perspective. After that, based on the AAN, TouchGraph and NetMiner are applied to calculate and rank the centrality degree of each sub-risk factor (or sub-heading) in a network. A RDGTS accident happened in 2001 is analyzed, the results show that TouchGraph and NetMiner can present the same interactions and importance of sub-risk factors (or sub-headings) through visible circle images in the platform, NetMiner is more digital because the results can be presented as the centrality degree values. The greatest contributed sub-risk factors are Equipment maintenance failure and Railway inspection agency failure, followed by cargo packaging problems, illegal entrainment problem. Misbehaves of the freight inspector with centrality degree 0.523810 shows that this sub-heading has the greatest contribution to the accident.