Risk analysis of domino effect of leakage accident of petrochemical pipeline based on analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy fault tree analysis

Pipeline transportation is a prevalent method for the conveyance of petrochemical fluids. Pipeline leakage can lead to severe consequences, such as fire or explosion accidents. Unlike traditional methods, which take pipeline leakage/failure as the top event of fault tree analysis (FTA), this paper studies the domino effect of pipeline leakage with the top event of the fire or explosion accident caused by petrochemical pipeline leakage. The risk assessment is based on the hybrid method combining the Analysis Hierarchy Process (AHP) and fuzzy theory. AHP is established to evaluate the ability of experts and fuzzy theory is used to convert the experts’ opinions into occurrence probabilities of basic events. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by performing a risk assessment in a long-distance oil pipeline. Qualitative analysis results based on the structural importance indicated that the formation condition of the combustible mixture has the largest structural importance. Quantitative analysis results showed that the proposed method, based on AHP and fuzzy theory, can evaluate the risk of the pipeline domino effect, which can be used to support risk management and decision-making for petrochemical pipelines.