Advancing Hazard Assessment of Energy Accidents in the Natural Gas Sector with Rough Set Theory and Decision Rules
1
Future Resilient Systems (FRS), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich, Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC), Singapore 138602, Singapore
2
Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), Laboratory for Energy Systems Analysis, 5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland
3
Institute of Computing Science, Poznań University of Technology, 60-965 Poznań, Poland
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
Current address: Environmental Decision Analytics Branch, Land Remediation and Technology Division, Center for Environmental Solutions and Emergency Response, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 45268 Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
Energies 2019, 12(21), 4178; https://doi.org/10.3390/en12214178
Received: 5 September 2019 / Revised: 24 October 2019 / Accepted: 29 October 2019 / Published: 1 November 2019
(This article belongs to the Section Electrical Power and Energy System)
The impacts of energy accidents are of primary interest for risk and resilience analysts, decision makers, and the general public. They can cause human health and environmental impacts, economic and societal losses, which justifies the interest in developing models to mitigate these adverse outcomes. We present a classification model for sorting energy accidents in the natural gas sector into hazard classes, according to their potential fatalities. The model is built on decision rules, which are knowledge blocks in the form of “if (condition), then (classification to hazard class x)”. They were extracted by the rough sets method using natural gas accident data from 1970–2016 of the Energy-related Severe Accident Database (ENSAD) of the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), the most authoritative information source for accidents in the energy sector. This was the first attempt to explore the relationships between the descriptors of energy accidents and the consequence (fatalities). The model was applied to a set of hypothetical accidents to show how the decision-making process could be supported when there is an interest in knowing which class (i.e., low, medium, high) of fatalities an energy accident could cause. The successful use of this approach in the natural gas sector proves that it can be also adapted for other energy chains, such as oil and coal.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Cinelli, M.; Spada, M.; Kadziński, M.; Miebs, G.; Burgherr, P. Advancing Hazard Assessment of Energy Accidents in the Natural Gas Sector with Rough Set Theory and Decision Rules. Energies 2019, 12, 4178.
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