Title: A probabilistic quantitative risk assessment model for fire in road tunnels with parameter uncertainty

Authors: Qiang Meng, Xiaobo Qu

Addresses: Department of Civil Engineering, National University of Singapore, 1 Engineering Drive 2, 117576, Singapore. ' Department of Civil Engineering, National University of Singapore, 1 Engineering Drive 2, 117576, Singapore

Abstract: Fire in road tunnels can lead to catastrophic consequences in combination with tunnel safety provision failures, thus necessitating a need for a reliable and robust approach to assess tunnel risks caused by fire. In a quantitative risk assessment (QRA) model for road tunnels, uncertainty is an unavoidable component because input parameters of the model possess different levels of uncertainties which are inappropriate to be formulated by crisp numbers. In this paper, a Monte Carlo sampling-based QRA model is proposed to address parameter uncertainty of a QRA model. The tunnel risks are assessed in terms of percentile-based societal risk as well as expected number of fatalities (ENF) curve, which would facilitate tunnel managers to make decisions. A case study is carried out to demonstrate the approach.

Keywords: QRA; quantitative risk assessment; road tunnels; societal risk; parameter uncertainty; tunnel fires; fire risks; Monte Carlo sampling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRS.2011.041181

International Journal of Reliability and Safety, 2011 Vol.5 No.3/4, pp.285 - 298

Received: 22 May 2010
Accepted: 12 Aug 2010
Published online: 31 Mar 2015 *

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