Techno-Economic Analysis of Fire Protection Barriers in the Chemical and Process Industry

The knock-on effects possibly triggered by a fire is responsible for most of domino accidents occurred in chemical and process industry. It mainly depends on the presence of fire protection barriers, as well as on the primary fire scenario and on separation distances between the units. Active and passive safety barriers are largely employed to prevent or delay the initiation or propagation of domino effects. However, a blinkered allocation approach of safety measures based on subjective strategy, which does not consider cascading effects possibly triggered by an accident, can lead to an employment of a safety plan that are not effective in mitigating the consequences of a domino accident. In the present work, a methodology to support and optimize the decision-making process for fire prevention in chemical environment is proposed. The methodology can provide an optimal safety plan, in other words an optimal allocation of safety measures, aimed to prevent and mitigate fire escalation, under budget constraint. Moreover, it is able to assess the economic convenience of the implementation of the safety plan, considering both the cost of safety measures and the hypothetical benefits deriving from avoided accidents. Therefore, a cost-effectiveness analysis with an optimization algorithm is used to allocate a limited budget in terms of safety barriers, and the cost- variable decision tree is proposed as a tool to support fire prevention investment decisions. In this regard, an approach by which a cost-variable decision tree analysis can be carried out is presented, taking into account knock-on effects possibly triggered by a fire accident. For the soul purpose of testing the developed methodology, it has been tested with a simple illustrative case-study representing a tank storage area. The results shows that the proposed methodology can effectively support the decision-making process.