Handling uncertainty in emergency plan evaluationusing generalized Petri Nets: Case study: Loss of a condensate tank containment

Emergency plans (EP) are complex systems which must be executed under time and efficiency constraints. They include elements of three different natures, technical, human and organizational where complex relationships exist between them. This inherent complexity may leads to a number of failures, such as unavailability of critical personnel or technical assets and inappropriate operators´ actions. In this paper we present a Petri Net-based approach to model and evaluate the performance of an EP related to condensate storage tank fire scenario, where uncertainties relating to task execution durations and reliability characteristics of technical equipments are considered. In fact, Petri Nets are a powerful tool to describe complex systems and their inherent interactions. Due to the EP complexity and uncertainty, results are obtained thanks to Monte Carlo simulation.