Disaster Chain Scenarios Evolutionary Analysis and Simulation Based on Fuzzy Petri Net: A Case Study on Marine Oil Spill Disaster

In a complex environment, a single disaster will generate a series of secondary disasters to form disaster chains. The simulation and prediction of the evolutionary direction of the disaster chain is a key aspect as well as a challenging problem during the emergency management of a disaster chain, accordingly there are two technical problems, the first one is how to describe the form of the disaster chains and the other one is how to model the evolution of the disaster chains. In order to solve these problems, this paper leverage Fuzzy Petri net as a powerful mathematical modelling tool, which can be used for the analysis of process evolution. Based on the traditional fuzzy Petri nets, a Disaster-Chain Fuzzy Petri net (DCFPN) method is proposed for describing the form of disaster chains and analyzing the evolutionary direction with the dynamic observed data. Based on the DCFPN method, this study constructs a general oil spill DCFPN model and takes the petrochemical spill incident in Fujian Province of China as a study case. The DCFPN model is used to dynamically deduce the evolutionary process of the case of oil spill disaster chain, reconstruct the evolutionary direction of the disaster chain, and analyze the riskiest path. The study found that the disaster chain scenarios deduced from the DCFPN model were consistent with the real situation, and this result would be useful for providing a scientific basis for the ‘chain-cutting disaster mitigation’ strategy for emergency management of disaster chains.