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What we do

The Scientific Objectives (SOs)

This project aims to investigate dynamic risk assessment and emergency decision optimization of fire evacuation in order to resolve the problems identified above and to enhance the safety and efficiency of offshore operations. 

  1. To propose approaches for simulating personnel evacuation in fire scenarios of an offshore platform, in order to appreciate the coupling of physical fire simulation and personnel behaviour simulation. 

  2. To propose novel methods for predicting the failure probability and the dynamic risk of fire evacuation.  

  3. To propose multi-objective optimization methods that can be used to improve the emergency decisions based on multiple criteria, including risk concerns and time saving. 

  4. To design an EDSS of offshore platform fires by integrating artificial intelligence with the VR technology. 

Overview of the action: 

A career-accelerator development plan will be implemented on the foundation of this inter/multidisciplinary research programme that builds an EDSS of offshore platform fires. The developed EDSS is capable of providing both data and theoretical support for dynamic risk assessment and emergency decision optimization to enhance the safety of offshore platforms. The outcomes of this project will also provide guidance for fire evacuation drills and training procedures for the offshore industry. This project takes offshore platform fires as the research object, however, the general rules obtained could provide useful enlightenment to form emergency plans relating to other accidents on offshore platforms. The continuous accumulation of knowledge in this field will promote safety technology innovations in engineering applications and the theoretical development of emergency evacuations throughout other industries. 

Project summary

In this project, fire accidents on offshore oil and gas platform will be analysed to identify the typical fire scenarios, followed by numerical simulation on the temporal and spatial evolution of the fires. Secondly, the coupling mechanism between human behavior and fire development will be investigated to quantitatively characterize the impact of fire on people and other assets. Thereafter, based on fire numerical simulation and multi-agent theory, an evacuation simulation model of offshore platform fires will be proposed. Thirdly, the dynamic risk of offshore platform fire evacuation will be evaluated by considering both failure consequences and their probabilities. A risk warning model of offshore platform fire evacuation will be built based on the Wavelet Genetic Neural Network. Finally, a dynamic decision-making support system for fire emergency evacuation will be designed by integrating Computation Fluid Dynamic (CFD), multi-agent theory and the Virtual Reality (VR) technology.  

This project covers a wide range of disciplines including CFD, multi-agent-based evacuation simulations, probabilistic inference (Bayesian inference and system dynamic model) and the VR technology. This Individual Fellowship will significantly accelerate the development of interdisciplinary knowledge, innovative research skills and new career of the nominated Fellow.   

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