Reliability assessment of emergency safety barriers based on an intuitionistic fuzzy sets aggregation procedure and subjective safety analysis: a case study

The Emergency safety barrier is one of the active technical barriers related to the safety of liquefied petroleum gas storage tanks. However, this study assesses the reliability of emergency safety barriers to help decision-makers understand how they can support decisions to reduce the risks associated with LPG storage. This paper aims to develop an integrated approach that uses an intuitionistic fuzzy sets aggregation procedure, subjective safety analysis, and emergency event tree analysis to handle uncertainty in the reliability assessment of emergency safety barriers. In addition, a case study on the reliability assessment of the emergency safety barriers of the LPG plant in Algeria based on the proposed methodology is provided and carried out to illustrate its effectiveness and feasibility. The results demonstrated the ability of intuitionistic fuzzy sets aggregation procedure and subjective safety analysis to provide highly reliable results and evaluate the reliability of emergency safety barriers. However, the classical event tree analysis does not consider the possibility of assessing the emergency consequences of different accident scenarios. Consequently, it only allows you to estimate the occurrence probability of accident scenarios. The results of this study show that the reliability of emergency safety barriers can be used to estimate the probability of emergency consequences under different accident scenarios, improve reliability, and help prioritize emergency improvement measures. The study provides scientific and operational references for analyzing the emergency consequences of various accident scenarios.