A New Approach Toward Natural and Anthropogenic Risk Assessment of Gas Power Plants

ABSTRACT

The current study focuses on identification and prioritization of the most important risks affecting a gas power plant located in southern Iran that was selected as a case study. After identifying risky activities, plant operations, and natural disasters, a Delphi questionnaire was prepared to specify crisis and accident-prone centers that could lead to the plant's destruction. After analyzing the questionnaires, the final criteria were determined. Subsequently, multi-criteria decision-making methods including the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) were applied to prioritize the identified criteria. The relative weights of the criteria were calculated using the eigenvector method in the environment of MATLAB and Expert Choice. In some cases, there was no correlation between the obtained results, resulting in a novel integrated technique consisting of three methods: average, Borda, and Copeland were used to reach a consensus for prioritizing the criteria. The risk assessment results indicate that gas and oil pipes, dust storm, and terrorism have the first to third priorities among the other risks. Some strategies are proposed to control and mitigate the identified risks.

Key Words:

• anthropogenic risk
• natural risk
• gas power plant
• aggregation method
• multi-criteria decision-making methods
• TOPSIS
• AHP.

APPENDIX

1. Formation of the Matrix A

2. Determination of (A − λ.I) Matrix

3. Calculating the determinant of (A − λ.I)matrix

4. The determinant of (A − λ.I) Matrix is put equal to zero and then, λ is calculated.

5. The highest value of  λ is called λ_maxand put it in relation of (A − λ_max) × W = 0, on condition that ∑W = 1, now, using the equation, the values of W_i are calculated

The following result will be obtained: W^T = (0.163, 0.297, 0.540)