Analysis of emergency response actions for preventing fire-induced domino effects based on an approach of reversed fuzzy Petri-net

In the chemical process industry, large quantities of different flammable substances are stored in tank farms. Due to potential mutual impacts among the tanks, severe domino accidents may occur after a tank catches fire. The emergency response to a tank fire may influence the development of the accident and impact the occurring of escalating events or so-called domino effects. In this paper, a fuzzy Petri-net (FPN) based reversed reasoning approach is proposed to analyze emergency response actions impacting domino effects. FPN is utilized to deduce the consequence-antecedent relationship between an accident and the emergency response actions. To analyze and compare the impacts of the actions on a domino effect, the backward reasoning is of special interest and often preferable when the occurrence probability of domino effects is known. As a tank fire accident in an oil depot usually lasts for a certain period of time, and as it may be greatly influenced by emergency response actions, it is taken as an example to illustrate the proposed approach.