Combining accident modeling and quantitative risk assessment in safety management

Abstract

Syncretic oil pumping–gas compression stations exist because oil and gas pipelines often run parallel to one another. Risk assessment and safety management present challenges in these stations because they house large numbers of devices that perform complicated operations. Quantitative risk assessment is effective in predicting probabilities and consequences of accidents; however, this method does not clearly address accident causation and other important factors that can lead to major accidents. To supplement quantitative risk assessment, this article proposes a safety barrier–based accident model for oil and gas stations based on the Swiss cheese model. An example is employed to illustrate the application of the combined method in safety management. Risk levels for different subsystems are calculated in quantitative risk assessment, and safety barriers with bad performance in high-risk subsystems are identified based on the proposed accident model. These results indicate that the combined method can be efficient for a complicated system since it helps the operators focus on the cells with high risk instead of the whole system.