An event processing architecture for operational risk management in an industrial environment

Abstract

The ISO 17776 standard, which deals with risk management in the oil and gas exploration and production (E&P) industry, recommends the use of measures called barriers to reduce the probability and the consequences of realizing a hazard's potential for harm. In this industry, this concept is widespread, and among the barrier-based risk management methods, the bow-tie method has been reported as one of the most widely used. However, the way the concept of barrier has been applied has not proven fully effective to prevent the occurrence of accidents, which keep happening and causing the loss of human lives, damages to the environment and both financial and image losses to the corporations involved. Some risk management experts from this industry have been supporting the idea that, in order to effectively manage operational risks and reduce the occurrence of accidents, just assessing risks and establishing preventive and mitigating barriers to control them is not enough, and continuous monitoring of the states of these barriers is required, but no concrete solution is proposed. This paper is based on a research developed within the context of a Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) division of an E&P operations unit of a major Brazilian energy company that aimed to add this ability to traditional bow-tie diagrams by using an event processing system that provides the automatic updating of the barriers' states. The system's architecture was built according to the Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) Reference Architecture as presented by the Reference Architecture Working Group (RAWG) at the 6th ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBS) in 2012. A prototype system was implemented and applied to a fictitious business scenario, allowing to analyze the adequacy of the event processing technique to the continuous monitoring of the states of the barriers of bow-tie diagrams.