Resilience-Based Survival Analysis in the Event of a Process Upset: A Case Study of Utility Plant

Abstract: In a process plant system, safe and reliable operations are highly sensitive to the power or steam failure, loss of cooling water or nitrogen or instrument air. Most of these products and services from utilities plant play an important role as safety barriers. The main focus of this paper is to propose a model for survival evaluation of a process system under an upset condition. This model is based on the holistic resilience-based method that integrates both technical (process parameters variations) and social (policy/regulations, human and organizational) factors. The resilience methodology emphasizes non-linear dynamics, new types of threats, uncertainty, survival through upset conditions and recovery from catastrophic situations ^{[1], [2]}.

The purpose of this paper is to maximize the performance of safety barriers that will be utilized in case of a process upset condition to prevent the escalation of the event into a catastrophic incident. In this work, a methodology is presented to select the best maintenance strategy ^[3] while considering the statutory safety regulations for maintenance of equipment like boilers, generators and more. Three different types of maintenance alternatives considered as part of this analysis are: predictive, preventative and condition-based. The key ideas of survival evaluation are presented using a utility plant as the case study.

References

1. Dinh, L. T., Pasman, H., Gao, X., & Mannan, M. S. (2012). Resilience engineering of industrial processes: principles and contributing factors. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 25(2), 233-241.
2. Jackson, S. (2009). Architecting resilient systems: Accident avoidance and survival and recovery from disruptions (Vol. 66). John Wiley & Sons.
3. Vassiliadis, C. G., & Pistikopoulos, E. N. (2001). Maintenance scheduling and process optimization under uncertainty. Computers & Chemical Engineering, 25(2), 217-236.