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Technological Risk Management in Real-time |
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On-line Documents
Project Deliverables
The on-line documents include the public Project Deliverables. These are parts extracted from the Deliverables of WP1, the Requirememnts Analysis including the Executive Summary, and Appendices of related technical information, and the subsequent on-line Project Deliverables, which include internal documents restricted to project participants. The documents provide the framework and background for the design of the HITERM system and demonstrator; they combine, more or less side-by-side, the background and requirements analysis and the emerging technical and functional specifications for the systems, and then describe the development steps and the three case study applications, and finally exploitation and dissemination issues.
1.1 The Regulatory Framework
Authors: Fausto Zani, SYRECO,
Nikolaus Seifter, ASIT.
Edited by K. Fedra, ESS.
Each country has its own regulation about industrial risk analysis, within the European Union generally derived from the framework of the EC Seveso Directive 82/501 and following modifications, in particular the new Seveso II Directive 96/82/EC. Those regulation requires the owner or operator responsible for an installation covered by the Directives (included in a certain list of hazardous activities, exceeding a given threshold of hazardous materials involved in the operations) to prepare and communicate a risk analysis and a Safety Report for the competent authorities. The frame of application of those regulations in Italy is quite detailed and extended up to a relatively low threshold value of hazardous material, thus identifying two different classes of Seveso Directive subjected activities (the so called Notification and Declaration), for which different competent authorities are responsible at a federal and local (Regional) level. The main objectives of the industrial risk analysis and Safety Report are:
Swiss regulation and law in the framework of industrial risk analysis (although not referring to EC Seveso Directive) pays attention to the impact of relevant accidents on population, as well as on the environment (surface and ground water pollution prevention), including general principles to standardize the essential safety requirements and extend the application field from hazardous material to micro-organisms. Transportation of Dangerous GoodsNo specific regulation exists in Italy about hazardous materials transport, since this is explicitly excluded from the application field of the Seveso Directive national implementation (with the exclusion of fixed installations, such as fixed/temporary storage, ports, railway stations and marshaling yards, loading docks, truck parks and so on), although an increasing interest towards a more stringent requirements is developing, waiting for the promulgation of a specific regulation concerning hazardous goods transport risk analysis. The situation is quite different in Switzerland and Portugal, where specific regulations, ordinances and laws exist, including safety requirements and risk analysis/safety report criteria for hazardous materials transport, quite similar to fixed hazardous installations. National regulations in those countries also include guidelines and requirements for road use and restrictions in case of hazardous goods transport that go beyond the international ADR requirements and regulations. Emergency Planning and Accident PreventionEach county has an its own regulations and organization for emergency and prevention planning and civil protection, including definition of the competent Authorities and structures/organization requirements for forecasting, prevention and rescue intervention. Those regulation are anyway very different, for instance, looking at Swiss and Italian laws and organization model, the latter being much more centralized at the national level than the former. The Swiss also demonstrated a strong organization and competence at the local (Municipal) level that does not exist in practice in Italy, where the decision is taken at provincial level by the national central representative (Prefetto). A certain distinction between the co-ordination and decision competencies and the operating intervention forces exist in Italy, resulting in some anomalous practical condition where the information on accident dynamics are first of all available at the intervention level, and only later at the decision making level. Swiss regulations again demonstrate a certain distinction in organization and competence according to the type of accident. Environmental HazardsNo specific regulation exists in Italy dealing with environmental and natural crises, other than the specific national and regional laws, not strictly targeted at environment emergency organization and planning. In comparison, Switzerland developed a specific regulation in this field, with specific application to forests, hydrology, land use planning and so on. 1.2 Institutional Structures1.3 Management and organization in Emergencies2.1 Emergency PlanningEmergency planning is considered one of the most important factors in industrial risk emergency management, and a specific regulation and set of guidelines have been emitted in each country. In particular, in Italy, a special guidelines for provisional emergency planning has been recently adopted by Ministry of Interior - Civil Protection Department, whose application is now progressing for all the Seveso classified hazardous activities, according to which a short-cut, quick method has to be applied for evaluation of the potentially affected zones in case of an accident. Threshold values have been defined in order to define the maximum radius associated to three zones for emergency planning:
for which different requirements in terms of resources, intervention in emergency and preventive/operating information to the population has to be provided. Fire Fighting Brigades are still using this method in the form of simple tables organized in informatic model, to define the potentially affected areas in case of accident. Quick and simple, but easily understood and applied methods like these should also be integrated as a first estimation method in a system like HITERM. Issues such as Risk analysis methodology, Preparedness (mainly awareness and knowledge of the area characteristics and potential useful resources in case of emergency), Co-ordination between intervention forces and Communication to population and the related aspects resulting from interviews to Italian deputies are presented too. Similar conclusions are drawn from the analysis and interviews conducted in Switzerland, where major attention is paid to the identification and analysis of the potential affected areas from the environment protection point of view. Emergency planning includes mapping on access routes, rescue equipment, communication facilities, drainage systems and retention basins, potentially vulnerable subjects and particularly endangered natural resources. Periodical exercises are also included in the emergency planning as an important factor for preparedness in the Swiss example. Emergency Management2.2 Hardware and Software Tools
HITERM is based on a client-server architecture that links easy-to-use front end (clients) with powerful High-Performance Computing as the main server. The basic architecture of the system is organized around a central HITERM Server, that coordinates the various information resources, prominently including the HPCN components like parallel computers or workstation clusters for better-than-real-time simulation of demanding models, potential links to monitoring equipment, and the user interface clients. Since the communication of the various software components is based on the standard http protocol, a high degree of hardware independence can be achieved: any platform and operating system that supports that protocol on top of TCP/IP can be integrated within this framework. For the hardware and software tools used for HITERM, we have to discriminate between:
2.2.1 Current practice and technical development graphical, analytical, interface toolsSoftware tools for risk analysis and risk management can be grouped into a number of categories:
2.2.2 Different tools and their compatibility with different development environments (languages, libraries, data formats)2.2.3 Different platform diffusion2.2.4 Tools, libraries, data bases and information sources for the final system2.2.5 Communication protocols and networkingTechnical/Human requirements and constraints3.1 Identification of technical constraints3.1.1 Minimum hardware equipmentThe minimum hardware requirements can be grouped into three more or less independent elements:
5. System requirements
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