The Use of Fuzzy Logic to Reduce uncertainty in Risk Management for Oil and Gas industry: Analysis of Texas City Oil Refinery Plant Explosion

Historically, risk matrices are used as bases of decision for improving safety, reliability and availability of oil and gas assets. Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) is used to determine the position of a component, unit, or process in the risk and criticality matrix. The red line introduce with authorities, which divides the risk matrix into two regions. The desirable section refers to the region where the production of consequence and likelihood reflect the criticality as very low or low. The undesirable region refers to the situation where the criticality reports as Medium or high Crossing the line towards undesirable region was the only concern of managers. All the efforts of experts, engineers and operators focused to bring the whole asset just below the red line. In other words the acceptable region defined as being just a step behind the red line. In fact such attitudes represent the view of looking at the problem as black and white rather than considering some uncertainties that might involve in risk assessment methods.