A novel framework for quantitative resilience assessment in complex engineering systems during early and late design stages

Recently, resilience assessment has evolved and grown in prominence, yet most studies are carried out on operational stage when sufficient knowledge on the processes is available, overlooking the design stage, a time frame that is more suitable for making a resilient system. To this end, this work aims at developing a novel quantitative resilience assessment framework for engineering systems with two different approaches that practically analyse resilience at the early and late design stages when detailed information on the system’s safety and resilience capabilities may be deficient. In the early design stage, system resilience attributes are identified, and expert judgment is used to assess their quality. In the late design stage, attributes are derived from revealed information such as detailed emergency response and safety barrier data. In both stages, dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) is used to quantify resilience based on the acquired information. Since the green hydrogen technology is relatively novice, the application of the proposed framework is demonstrated in a resilience assessment of a green hydrogen plant undergoing hydrogen release scenarios. The proposed framework can be used as an effective tool for early design improvements as well as enhancing process safety in the late design stage of hydrogen plants or any other complex engineering system.