Towards dynamic risk analysis: A review of the risk assessment approach and its limitations in the chemical process industry

• Published in: Safety science Vol. 89; pp. 77 - 93
• Main Authors: Villa, Valeria, Paltrinieri, Nicola, Khan, Faisal, Cozzani, Valerio
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.11.2016
• Subjects: Chemical process industry; Dynamic risk assessment; Quantitative risk assessment; Risk analysis; Chemical process industry; Risk analysis; Dynamic risk assessment; Quantitative risk assessment
• ISSN: 0925-7535; 1879-1042
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ssci.2016.06.002

•Risk definitions may have implications on the overall risk management.•Fundamentals and applications of QRA for chemical process industry are reviewed.•QRA accomplishments and criticisms are pointed out to define the way forward.•Dynamic approaches that proved the ability to improve risk analysis are presented.•Dynamic Risk Analysis approaches may reshape the Risk Management framework. The objective of this review is to analyse the progress of Risk Assessment during the last decades and to offer an overview on its recent advancements and possible future direction for chemical and process industries. Despite the general approach of Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) is unchanged since its origin in the early 1980s, QRA has continuously evolved in different forms and its fields of application have enlarged significantly beyond process safety, where it has always been traditionally developed and used for chemical process industries. Now risk assessment techniques play a fundamental role in process design, implementation of safety systems, inspection and maintenance planning as well as operation management. Eventually risk assessment has become an essential tool for the development, continued operation and expansion of process installations. On the other hand, QRA limitations, such as its inability to update the risk picture, led to the development of several recent dynamic risk assessment approaches, whose methodological and applicative contributions are presented in this paper. This demonstrates that risk assessment is in continuous development; nevertheless, it still shows many challenges to face: the way forward is improving its preciseness and its capability to be dynamically updated, that it will be useful to support real-time decision-making.