Critical Risks Method (CRM): A New Safety Allocation Approach for a Critical Infrastructure

Abstract

In the current research, a safety allocation technique named the Critical Risks Method (CRM) has been developed. Starting from a literature review, we analyzed the shortcomings of conventional methods. The outcomes show the primary two criticalities of the most important safety allocation approaches: (1) They are developed for series configuration, but not for parallel ones; (2) they ordinarily give only qualitative outputs, but not quantitative ones. Moreover, by applying the conventional methods, an increase in safety of the units to ensure the safety target leads to an increase of the production costs of the units. The proposed strategy can overcome the shortcomings of traditional techniques with a safety approach useful to series–parallel systems in order to obtain quantitative outputs in terms of failures in a year. The CRM considers six factors that are able to ensure its applicability to a great variety of critical infrastructures. In addition, CRM is described by a simply analytic definition. The CRM was applied to a critical infrastructure (Liquid Nitrogen Cooling Installation) in a nuclear plant designed with series–parallel units. By comparing the CRM outputs with databank safety values, the proposed method was validated.