IMPLEMENTATION OF RISK ASSESSMENT FOR CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION WITH THE USE OF RISK MATRIX

The object of research: risk assessment for critical infrastructure protection in Ukraine. Investigated problem: adaptation and implementation of European Union’s approach to the risk assessment for critical infrastructure for the conditions of Ukraine. The main scientific results: The most relevant types of threats of natural and man-made origin for the security of critical infrastructure in Ukraine are investigated. The adaptation and implementation of European Union’s approach to the risk assessment for critical infrastructure for the conditions of Ukraine is realized. For this the character of changes of natural and man-made emergencies in Ukraine in the context of impact on critical infrastructure is investigated. The risk of economic losses due to emergencies in Ukraine has been evaluated with the use of risk matrix, taking into account the adapted approach applied in the European Union. Field of practical use of research results: Critical infrastructure facility including systems and physical or virtual resources that provide functions and services, failure of which can lead to significant negative consequences for society, social and economic development of the country and ensuring national security. Among them the most important are objects of electric-power industry, especially important objects of the oil and gas industry; units of the state government and local administration; objects of possible terrorist attacks; facilities subject to protection and defense in emergencies and during special periods; facilities subject to mandatory protection by the State Protection Service under contracts. Innovative technology product: methodology for assessing threats and risks to critical infrastructure, which can greatly contribute to the development of measures to prevent and minimize the negative consequences of emergencies possible in Ukraine at critical infrastructure objects. Scope of the innovative technology product: state system for critical infrastructure protection in Ukraine

ANALIZA RIZIKA OD PADA KROVINE I PREDVIĐANJE OŠTEĆENJA PODRUČJA PRI RUDARENJU UGLJENA POVLAČENJEM ŠIROKOGA ČELA

This study presents a model based on rock engineering systems (RES) to evaluate the risk of roof falls and determine damaged regions, using recorded roof falls, prior to mining with a retreat from a longwall face. In this regard, a case study was considered to examine the model. The results showed that the level of determined risk has an acceptable correlation with the special roof fall (SRF), with R-squared value (R2) equal to 0.792 for all estimated vulnerability indexes (VIs) in considered longwall panels. By investigating and comparing the evaluated values of VI in considered panels and their corresponding recorded roof falls, damaged regions were distinguished from undamaged regions. Based on these investigations, four classes including safe, moderate, danger, and critical regions were determined to identify the safe and damaged regions prior to the mining operation. The results of the research showed that the identification of damaged regions is feasible to provide a detailed operation plan to control roof falls in longwall mining faces through the developed approach. The RES-based model could be used for the same conditions and the presented methodology could be applied to other parts in underground coal mines.U ovome radu prikazan je model utemeljen na sustavima inženjerskih stijena za procjenu rizika od urušavanja (pada) krovine i određivanje oštećenih područja primjenom zabilježenih padova krovine, prije rudarenja metodom širokoga čela. Razmatrana je studija slučaja koja je ispitala model. Rezultati su pokazali da je razina utvrđenoga rizika imala relativno prihvatljivu korelaciju i kompatibilnost s posebnim padom krovine (PPK), s koeficijentom determinacije (R2) jednakim 0,792 za sve procijenjene indekse ranjivosti (IR) u razmatranim područjima rudarenja. Istražujući i uspoređujući procijenjene vrijednosti indeksa ranjivosti na razmatranim područjima i pripadajućim zabilježenim padovima krovine, otkrivena su oštećena područja unutar onih neoštećenih. Na temelju tih istraživanja izvedene su četiri klase: sigurno, umjereno, opasno i kritično područje, radi identificiranja sigurnih, umjereno opasnih i kritičnih područja prije rudarskih operacija. Rezultati istraživanja pokazali su da je identificiranje štetnih područja razvijenim pristupom prikladno za izradu detaljnoga operativnoga plana za kontrolu pada krovine na širokom čelu. Konačno, model temeljen na inženjerskim sustavima stijena može se koristiti i drugdje za iste uvjete, a predstavljena metodologija može se primijeniti i na ostale dijelove podzemnih rudnika ugljena

The safety and sustainability of mining at diverse scales: Placing health and safety at the core of responsibility

Mining plays a major role in meeting global resource demands with Europe hosting extensive mineral potential. However, few of these prospects are feasible for conventional exploitation due to their small size & ore grade, proximity to dense populations and tenement constraints. Hence, a significant paradigm shift towards switch-on, switch off small-scale mining (SOSO SSM) is needed in order to increase the viability of small, complex, high-grade deposits. The IMP@CT project developed mobile, modularised solutions to facilitate rapid deployment and in-situ extraction & processing, which necessitates the translation and extension of best practice safety and sustainability from established national regulations and industry standards. Despite decades of accumulated safety regulation, knowledge and experience, workplace errors and violations still lead to fatal accidents, particularly if immature safety attitudes and behaviours pervade an organisation. The presence of a mature safety culture is vital for mitigating the occurrence of injuries and fatalities, through a collective commitment to safety improvement. This study has aimed to consolidate safety and sustainability best practice that is tailored to SSM by identifying the critical safety considerations and applying safety culture maturity principles to the specific challenges associated with a semi-automated SOSO SSM system. Criteria-driven maturity modelling, informed by existing responsible mining initiatives and safety and socio-environmental culture perspectives from site personnel at all hierarchical levels, is developed to assess the environmental and social factors associated with small- to medium-scale regulated mining. The role of agile management for rapid adaptation and continuous improvement of safety and sustainability performance in SOSO SSM is discussed. This research has demonstrated that for SOSO SSM to effectively integrate a mature safety and socio-environmental culture within a flexible, containerised mining paradigm, managerial and technical agility, and human initiative must be encouraged to continuously drive progress in occupational health and safety and generate wider societal benefit

The risk of collapse in abandoned mine sites: the issue of data uncertainty

Ground collapses over abandoned underground mines constitute a new environmental risk in the world. The high risk associated with subsurface voids, together with lack of knowledge of the geometric and geomechanical features of mining areas, makes abandoned underground mines one of the current challenges for countries with a long mining history. In this study, a stability analysis of Montevecchia marl mine is performed in order to validate a general approach that takes into account the poor local information and the variability of the input data. The collapse risk was evaluated through a numerical approach that, starting with some simplifying assumptions, is able to provide an overview of the collapse probability. The nal results is an easy-accessible-transparent summary graph that shows the collapse probability. This approach may be useful for public administrators called upon to manage this environmental risk. The approach tries to simplify this complex problem in order to achieve a roughly risk assessment, but, since it relies on just a small amount of information, any nal user should be aware that a comprehensive and detailed risk scenario can be generated only through more exhaustive investigations

Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches for Evaluation of Safety Risks in Coal Mines

The safety in underground coal mines continues to be a major problem in the Indian mining industry. Despite significant measures taken by the Directorate General of Mines Safety (DGMS) to reduce the number of mining accidents in underground coal mines, the number remains high. To improve the safety conditions, it has become a prerequisite to performing risk assessment for various operations in Indian mines. It is noted that many research studies conducted in the past are limited to either statistical analysis of accidents or study of single equipment or operation using qualitative and quantitative techniques. Limited work has been done to identify, analyse, and evaluate the safety risks of a complete underground coal mine in India. The present study attempts to determine the appropriate qualitative and quantitative risk assessment approaches for the evaluation of safety risks in Indian underground coal mines. This thesis addresses several important objectives as (i) to identify the type of safety risk analysis techniques suitable for evaluating various mining scenarios (ii) to identify and analyse the hazard factors and hazardous events that affects the safety in underground coal using the qualitative and quantitative approaches (iii) to evaluate the risk level (RL) of the hazardous factors/groups, hazardous events, and the overall mine using the proposed methodology. In this research work, the qualitative techniques, i.e. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Workplace Risk Assessment and Control (WRAC), and the quantitative techniques, i.e. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Event Tree Analysis (ETA) were applied in an underground coal mine to identify and analyse the hazard factors and hazard events. The analysis of FMEA and WRAC results concluded that the qualitative risk assessment is easy to execute and practical as they are not dependent on the historical data; rather they need experience and close examination. On the other hand, they may yield subjective results due to instinctive human assessment. The analysis of the FTA and ETA results concluded that the quantitative risk assessment could not be performed in Indian underground coal mines due to lack of probability, exposure, and consequence data. To overcome the mentioned problems in qualitative and quantitative techniques, a methodology was proposed for evaluation of the safety risks of hazard events, hazard groups, and overall mine. The proposed methodology is the unification of fuzzy logic, VIKOR (In Serbia: VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje, that means: Multi-criteria Optimization and Compromise Solution), and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) techniques. Because of the imprecise nature of the information available in the mining industry, fuzzy logic was employed to evaluate the risk of each hazardous event in terms of consequence, exposure, and probability. VIKOR as was used to rank the evaluated risk of hazardous events. AHP technique helps to determine the relative importance of the risk factors. Therefore, AHP technique was integrated into the risk model so that the risk evaluation can progress from hazardous event level to hazard factor level and finally to overall mine level. To reduce the calculation time significantly and to increase the speed of the proposed risk assessment process, a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (TRAM) was developed using the C# language through Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 and .Net libraries. The proposed methodology developed in this thesis was applied to six underground coal mines. The results presented the risk level of hazard events, hazards groups and overall mine of six mines. The mine-5 has the highest risk level among the evaluated mines. The ranking order of the mines observed based on the overall risk level is mine-5> mine-1 > mine-2 > mine-3 > mine-6 > mine-4. The results of the proposed methodology were compared with DGMS proposed rapid ranking method. This is observed that the proposed methodology presents better evaluation than other approaches. This study could help the mine management to prepare safety measures based on the risk rankings obtained. It may also aid to evaluate accurate risk levels with identified hazards while preparing risk management plans

The risk of collapse in abandoned mine sites: the issue of data uncertainty

Ground collapses over abandoned underground mines constitute a new environmental risk in the world. The high risk associated with subsurface voids, together with lack of knowledge of the geometric and geomechanical features of mining areas, makes abandoned underground mines one of the current challenges for countries with a long mining history. In this study, a stability analysis of Montevecchia marl mine is performed in order to validate a general approach that takes into account the poor local information and the variability of the input data. The collapse risk was evaluated through a numerical approach that, starting with some simplifying assumptions, is able to provide an overview of the collapse probability. The nal results is an easy-accessible-transparent summary graph that shows the collapse probability. This approach may be useful for public administrators called upon to manage this environmental risk. The approach tries to simplify this complex problem in order to achieve a roughly risk assessment, but, since it relies on just a small amount of information, any nal user should be aware that a comprehensive and detailed risk scenario can be generated only through more exhaustive investigations

Experimental and numerical modelling investigations into coal mine rockbursts and gas outbursts

Rockbursts and gas outbursts are a longstanding hazard in underground coal mining due to their sudden occurrences and high consequences. These hazards are becoming prominent due to the increase in mining depth, difficult mining conditions, and adverse gas pressure conditions. Several researchers have proposed different theories, mechanisms, and indices to determine the rockbursts and gas outbursts liability but most of them focus on only some aspects of the complex engineering system for the ease to represent them using partial differential equations. They have often ignored the dynamics of changing mining environment, coal seam heterogeneity and stochastic variations in the rock properties. Most of the indices proposed were empirical and their suitability to different mining conditions is largely debated. To overcome the limitations of previous theories, mechanisms and indices, a probabilistic risk assessment framework was developed in this research to mathematically represent the complex engineering phenomena of rockbursts and gas outbursts for a heterogeneous coal seam. An innovative object-based non-conditional simulation approach was used to distribute lithological heterogeneity occurring in the coal seam to respect their geological origin. The dynamically changing mining conditions during a longwall top coal caving mining (LTCC) was extracted from a coupled numerical model to provide statistically sufficient data for probabilistic analysis. The complex interdependencies among several parameters, their stochastic variations and uncertainty were realistically implemented in the GoldSim software, and 100,000 equally likely scenarios were simulated using the Monte Carlo method to determine the probability of rockbursts and gas outbursts. The results obtained from the probabilistic risk assessment analysis incorporate the variations occurring due to lithological heterogeneity and give a probability for the occurrence of rockbursts, coal and gas outbursts, and safe mining conditions. The framework realistically represents the complex mining environment, is resilient and results are reliable. The framework is generic and can be suitably modified to be used in different underground mining scenarios, overcoming the limitations of earlier empirical indices used.Open Acces

Study on Energy Accumulation and Dissipation Associated with Coal Burst

Coal burst, which refers to the brittle failure of coal, has been a serious hazard for underground coal mining, particularly at greater depth. Massive energy accumulated in coal could be dissipated almost instantaneously in the form of kinetic energy when the loading stress exceeding the ultimate strength of coal. This thesis qualitatively and quantitatively examines the energy accumulation and dissipation process associated with coal burst through a comprehensive research program of literature review, theoretical analysis and experimental studies. The energy accumulation sources, dissipation forms and its influencing factors of coal burst are reviewed based on the energy conservation law and the static-dynamic loads superposition theory. The burst energy is provided by static loads including gravitational and abutment stress, and dynamic loads including fault slipping and roof weighting. Studies indicated that the main driving energy source of coal burst occurred in Australian coal mines resulted from elastic energy storage that has been accumulated during the loading process of coal