Managing Geohazards - Quantitative Risk Assessment for Pipelines

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the value of a quantitative risk assessment tool for management of geohazard threats to pipelines.Phase I will determine data sources for quantitative risk assessment to support management and decision-making needs of pipeline industry stakeholders; identify the potential market for such a tool; identify a study location to test developed models; and develop a Concept of Operations for the tool.Phase I will leverage existing physics-based fragility curves for seismic hazards and fragility curves for hydrologic and geotechnical hazards will be developed based on the results of data mining incident data and literature.Stochastic approaches, such as, Bayesian Belief Networks and Monte Carlo, will be incorporated into all models to address uncertainty.Users will be able to perform sensitivity tests and observe the estimated change in risk through mitigation measures and/or adjusting those factors that contribute to a segment’s resistance to a hazard.Operators will be able to stress test pipelines against tectonic, hydrologic, and seismically related hazards by running a single simulation to model isolated threats or multiple simulations to model cascading threats.Quantitative risk data will allow for integration of findings into traditional engineering decision making tools.