A probabilistic framework for risk management and emergency decision-making of marine oil spill accidents

Offshore oil spills may pose a severe threat to marine ecological environment. In this paper, a new methodology based on Bayesian network (BN) and Influence Diagram (ID) is developed for risk management and emergency decision-making of marine oil spill accidents. The methodology integrates risk management before accident and emergency response after accident, which can balance risk and cost, and render an optimal decision-making. Marine oil spill scenarios including root causations, intermediate and consequent events are identified and modeled using BN considering the dependencies and multi-state of incident process nodes. The probabilities of offshore oil spill incident and the resulting ecological disasters are estimated. The prevention and mitigation measures marine oil spill incidents are identified and added to BN for developing Bayesian ID model, in which the cost and utility of implementing each safety measure are considered. Bayesian ID model can estimate the cost and utility of all safety strategies, and the optimal risk management and emergency strategy are determined by balancing the cost and utility. A case study of marine oil spill accident due to subsea oil pipeline leak is used to illustrate the methodology. It is observed that the methodology can efficiently support the decision-making of oil and gas sector in risk management and emergency response of offshore oil spill accidents.