Integrated Approach of Safety, Sustainability, Reliability, and Resilience Analysis via a Return on Investment Metric

Abstract

The process design and technology selection are driven by multiple objectives including technical, economic, environmental, safety, and resilience drivers. Traditionally, technoeconomic analyses have been used to select and optimize the process design. Subsequently, environmental, safety, and resilience issues have been included in post-design analysis. With the recognition of the importance of including various objectives during the early stages of the process design, there has been a growing interest in the development of systematic methods for the multi-objective conceptual design. Recently, novel concepts have been proposed for the incorporation of sustainability and safety in designs through financial frameworks. In the current work, an extended approach is proposed for the incorporation of reliability, resilience, safety, and sustainability aspects during the conceptual design of the process system. In this proposed methodology, safety and sustainability weighted return on investment metric (SASWROIM) is extended to include impacts of resilience and reliability aspects with different design changes and configurations. For this purpose, a safety, sustainability, reliability, and resilience weighted return on investment metric (S2R2WROIM) is introduced. Multi-objective decision-making can thus be carried out for the optimal design based on this augmented method over the convention economic return on investment metric. The general methodology to screen process alternatives through S2R2WROIM begins with the synthesis and simulation of base case and alternative case flowsheet in Aspen HYSYS. This is followed by performance analysis, evaluation of various metrics, and applications of integrated metric to select the recommended design. A compressor process system case study in a hydrocracking process plant is demonstrated to illustrate the applications and benefits of the proposed methodology. The new approach provides decision makers with meaningful information and insights about safety, reliability, resilience, and sustainability along with the economic aspect.

Disaster-Resilient Design of Manufacturing Facilities Through Process Integration: Principal Strategies, Perspectives, and Research Challenges

“…• Resilience metrics for the process industries: Although there have been attempts to develop resilience metrics for general systems and infrastructures, there is a critical need to develop resilience metrics for the process industries especially concerning the characteristics and idiosyncrasies associated with the 12 resilience strategies identified in this work. Toward this goal, recent research efforts have endeavored to use the concept of sustainability-weighted return on investment (El-Halwagi, 2017a) to extend it to include safety and resilience (Guillen-Cuevas et al, 2018;Moreno-Sader et al, 2019). These approaches use the power of process-integration targeting to set resilience within a financial framework.…”

“…Jain et al (2017Jain et al ( , 2018 introduced process analysis framework to assess resilience and highlighted the importance of three characteristics of resilience: avoidance, survival, and recovery. Moreno-Sader et al (2019) introduced an economic framework for coupling conventional profitability analysis with resilience projects using processintegration targeting techniques. Jain et al (2020) introduced a process resilience analysis framework and used it to illustrate the relationship between strengthening process resilience and enhancing sustainability and business continuity.…”

Resilience of Process Plant: What, Why, and How Resilience Can Improve Safety and Sustainability

“…This work was followed by another five years (2013-2018) of research resulting in a much sharper contour on process resilience definition, resilience concepts, metrics, and demonstration of practical methods for process systems in the way of process resilience analysis framework (PRAF) (Jain et al [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]). These papers respectively addressed the necessity of resilience [21], its elements [22], the framework and how that works out at the plant system level [23], the same with regards to management system level [24], resilience metrics with weights [25], predictability of process abnormal situations/upsets given resilience metrics' outcomes illustrated by a batch plant case study [26] and [27], resilience analysis-based data-driven maintenance optimization on a cooling tower case [28], how resilience can be part of a conceptual process design and technology selection phase [29], and finally, what a state of good resilience can mean for business continuity and sustainability [30]. In the next few sections, more details will be described.…”

“…Jain et al [29] modified the existing SASWROIM (Safety and Sustainability Weighted Return On Investment Metric, see Table 1) to include reliability and resilience analysis during process design and technology selection phase. This has been the first attempt to incorporate reliability and resilience in the conceptual design stage, the proposed methodology is depicted in Figure 9.…”

“…This has been the first attempt to incorporate reliability and resilience in the conceptual design stage, the proposed methodology is depicted in Figure 9. The mathematical model proposed by [29] can evaluate S2R2WROIM for a design alternative by comparing the indicators with the base case and targeted values set by the governing organization. Table 1 lists out all the step-by-step modifications in ROI metric over the time.…”