Midlands Branch – Current challenges and future solutions for systems safety analysis
Most common risk assessment methodologies, such as Fault and Event Tree, have played a crucial role in the design and safe operation of complex engineering systems, providing a common and robust modelling language widely adopted by designers, analysts and regulators alike. The reason for the continued success of these techniques, which still represent the industry standards more than 50 years after their first introduction, lies with their robustness as well as manageable computational cost. However, these aspects come at the cost of significant limitations in capturing the behaviour of dynamic and dependent systems, hence limiting the capability of these methodologies to model modern engineering systems.
Alternative techniques such as Markov Models and Petri Nets, offer extreme modelling flexibility and accuracy, but offer an infeasible option for the modelling of industrial sized systems due to their high computational demand.
The talk describes research carried out on the Lloyd’s Register Foundation funded project NxGen (Next Generation Prediction Methodologies and Tools for System Safety Analysis) to tackle such issues, investigating theoretical and computational strategies focusing on overcoming current limitations. As a result of this, a novel umbrella methodology integrating a range of existing techniques (i.e. Fault and Event Trees, Binary Decision Diagrams, Petri Nets, Markov Models) has been developed. The core strength of the proposed approach is the ability to enhance the “modelling resolution” for those sections of the system characterised by dynamic features, or dependencies, while maintaining low-cost modelling for those parts of the system for which traditional simplifying assumptions (e.g. components independence) are valid.
The talk aims at providing an overview of the modelling framework under development and its capabilities, discussing the current research challenges and future potential applications.
To register for the webinar please click here. SaRS webinars are free and open to all non-members and members.
The webinar will be presented by:
Dr Silvia Tolo from the University of Nottingham. Dr Tolo gained an M.Sc. in Energy and Nuclear Engineering from the University of Bologna, and subsequently collaborated with the Institute for Risk and Uncertainty at the University of Liverpool, where she was awarded a Ph.D. She is currently undertaking research within The Resilience Engineering Research Group at the University of Nottingham on the development of theoretical and computational tools for the efficient modelling of complex systems.
Starts
Tuesday, 26th April 2022 at 5:30pm
Ends
Tuesday, 26th April 2022 at 7:00pm