Genserik Reniers

Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Values and Technology

Natural gas pipeline construction is developing rapidly worldwide to meet the needs of international and domestic energy transportation. Meanwhile, leakage accidents occur to natural gas pipelines frequently due to mechanical failure, personal operation errors, etc., and induce huge economic property loss, environmental damages, and even casualties...

Domino accidents are typical low-frequency and high-consequence events in chemical process industries. Applying quantitative risk assessment (QRA) in domino accident assessment is challenging due to the uncertainties in the escalation process. Meanwhile, the outcomes of QRA are subject to a certain degree of unreliability due to the inappropriate r...

An integrated approach for performance assessment and management of safety barriers in a systemic manner is needed concerning the prevention and mitigation of major accidents in chemical process industries. Particularly, the effects of safety barriers on system risk reduction should be assessed in a dynamic manner to support the decision-making on...

Offshore Oil&Gas facilities are attractive targets of intentional malicious attacks (security attacks) that may trigger cascading events (e.g., the release and dispersion of hazardous material and/or energy, fires, explosions) with consequences on people, environment, and assets. The severity of these consequences is potentially similar to those ar...

ChatGPT is a highly advanced AI language model that has gained widespread popularity. It is trained to understand and generate human language and is used in various applications, including automated customer service, chatbots, and content generation. While it has the potential to offer many benefits, there are also concerns about its potential for...

It is well known that safety climate (SC) has paramount significance in safety science and accident prevention. In this paper, a bibliometric data mining is conducted to systematically review the research domain of SC. Overall, 1624 documents on SC are obtained, covering 4830 authors, 473 journals, 89 countries/regions, and 1766 institutions betwee...

Chemical plants face safety hazards and security threats that may induce catastrophic scenarios. Safety and security barriers are employed widely to protect chemical plants from accidental and intentional undesired events and mitigate consequences. Managing safety and security barriers effectively and economically is a research topic with practical...

Resilience assessment and management of technical systems have been increasingly important as the current applications in the process industries are becoming more complex. Several review papers on resilience management methods and applications have been published by researchers from different aspects. However, none of them put the focus on bibliome...

Biomass valorization represents a simple way to reduce Green House Gases emissions. However, the biomass-to-energy field is limited by high gaseous emission concentrations. Innovative abatement technologies can make gaseous emissions close to zero. In this work, three different NO 2 abatement technologies were assessed and compared. A deterministic...

An exponential amount of academic research has been dedicated to the safety culture concept, but still, no consensus has been reached on its definition and content. In general, safety culture research lacks an interdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, although the concept of safety culture is characterised by complexity and multifacetedness, the saf...

A domino effect triggered by a natural event (a so-called Natech domino effect) represents a typical high-impact low-probability (HILP) event, which may lead to catastrophic consequences. The presence of safety barriers could have an impact on the effects by impeding propagation patterns and mitigating potential consequences. However, coordinating...

Despite the systems approach to accident analysis being the dominant research paradigm and the concept of SMS being introduced in high-risk industries already for several years, accident investigation practice is still poor in analysing the basic elements that compose a safety management system (SMS) and in embracing system theory. In search of a s...

Transparency about health and safety risks is a complex societal, moral, ethical and political concept. Full transparency does not come natural for any of the key stakeholder groups: organizations, authorities and the people. If safety information is not sufficiently shared between them, people and the environment can be harmed. The authors explore...

Fire is one of the main accident scenarios occurring in chemical and process plants, and it can lead to domino effects due to thermal radiation. Emergency response is necessary to prevent fire escalation, in addition to safety barriers. In major industrial fire accidents, backup is usually required in emergency response, due to the lack of emergenc...

As a kind of critical infrastructure of energy transportation, so-called ‘utility tunnels’ have been developed around the world. Hosting a natural gas pipeline inside the natural gas compartment of a utility tunnel facilitates its maintenance but also brings potential explosion concerns due to the confined space. Although some work focuses on the r...

Information literacy has gradually become one of the necessary qualities in current and future safety practices. The calculation and assessment of information literacy of safety professionals is an effective way to understand their information literacy level. This paper, therefore, aims to evaluate the information literacy level of safety managemen...

A fire accident is one the most dangerous accidents that may lead to knock-on effects, especially in the plants dealing with large quantities of hazardous substances. Different from other accidents, e.g., explosions, fires can last certain period of time and the thermal radiations emitted by them have a synergistic effect. At the same time, the hea...

Toxic gas leakage represents a type of major process accident scenario threatening human life. Technical and non-technical safety barriers are employed to prevent toxic gas leakage accidents or mitigate the possible catastrophic consequences. Evacuation must be executed in severe toxic gas release scenarios. The performance assessment of technical...

Natural hazards may rapidly lead to a massive domino chain in chemical industrial parks (CIPs). This work develops a high-efficiency and systematic analytical framework that is applicable to a broad range of uncertain and time-varying factors related to the evolution process of natural hazard-induced domino chain (NHDC). Specifically, the evolution...

Safety and security barriers are implemented in various forms to protect chemical plants from undesired accidents and mitigate the disastrous consequences. However, the necessity and rationality of integrating safety and security barriers need to be investigated, and the difficulty in integrated management of safety and security barriers is still a...

Due to the rapid development of technology, process systems become dynamic, automated, and complex, resulting in the strong interdependence and interaction among components and ensuring system safety by conventional methods a challenge. Compared with traditional risk assessment methods, resilience assessment is a more appropriate method for ensurin...

As policy makers are developing new alternative strategies to prevent bicycle theft, a nudging approach could provide useful insights in this field. In the current study, two different nudges were implemented at a selection of bicycle parking facilities in the neighborhood of a Belgian university campus. To measure the effectiveness of the nudges,...

The metal sector encompasses a variety of economic activities, such as metallurgy and the manufacturing of metallic elements. These activities represent great diversity in production processes. Worker-related characteristics are particularly important in these processes and the accident rate. In view of the metal sector’s importance and that the la...

Chemical process industries are threatened with accidental and intentional adverse events because of the storage and operation of large quantities of hazardous substances. Safety and security barriers play important roles in protecting the chemical plants from safety and security-related undesired events and mitigating the potentially catastrophic...

Data uncertainties caused by the lack of knowledge and nature variation or randomness present vital challenges to domino effects modelling. To improve the assessment of the propagation probabilities and consequences of the domino-effect accidents, the influence of various types of uncertainties on risk assessment results needs to be investigated. H...

Bij verbeteren van de veiligheid is het in kaart brengen van problemen de eerste stap. Een nieuwe tool maakt het mogelijk ook de medewerkers zelf daar bij in te schakelen. Voor veiligheidskundigen betekent deze extra hulp dat er meer bewijs kan worden verzameld over onveilige situaties. De medewerkers krijgen meer inzicht en het draagvlak voor same...

Met de photovoice methode gaan medewerkers, patiënten of hun naasten zelf aan de slag met het opzoeken en aankaarten van risico's en gevaren. Het levert naast tastbaar bewijs ook meteen draagvlak op voor het realiseren van verbeteringen. Een praktische methode waarmee direct betrokkenen zelf hun situatie kunnen onderzoeken, wat zij nodig hebben en...

In recent years, frequent large-scale power grid accidents have caused serious economic losses and bad social impact, which has drawn great attention from power grid enterprises. As one of the key elements of production, safety investment plays an important role in improving the safety level and reducing accident loss. In this paper, System dynamic...

We witness many severe accidents in different sectors worldwide every year, resulting in fatalities, injuries, environmental pollution, property loss, etc. Safety management aims to use interventions to prevent these undesired events and thus avoid different kinds of loss. Various interventions that have different safety performances and costs are...

The chemical process industry (CPI) in China is developing rapidly with installations becoming more complicated and integrated to meet people’s rising demands for chemical-related products. However, the fast-growing CPI has caused catastrophic consequences and bad social influence due to accidents occurred in the last decades, which has threatened...

Emergency response is an important way to reduce losses after a major industrial accident occurs and mitigation measures should be arranged and analyzed in preparedness. The cooperation in emergency response actions which make up an emergency response process has a significant impact on the efficiency and success rate (or reliability) of emergency...

Chemical process systems (CPSs) involve complex dynamic processes. Besides, the emergent and uncertain hazards and disruptions cannot be identified entirely and prevented by conventional methods. In those situations, resilience for CPSs plays an essential role in absorbing, adapting to disruptions, and restoring from damages. Systemic modeling play...

Safety management systems (SMSs) are widely applied across many industrial sectors, and a large body of literature has been published addressing their design, implementation, effectiveness, and associated challenges. This article presents a high-level analysis of the SMS research domain, guided by a set of questions addressing the contents, structu...

Bedrijven en individuen schenden soms de morele en ethische regels. Dit raakt aan gezondheid, milieu en veiligheid. In een veiligheidsbeheerssysteem krijgt ethiek doorgaans weinig aandacht. Hoe kan de veiligheidsprofessional hier iets aan doen?

Bedrijven en individuen schenden soms de morele en ethische regels. Dit raakt aan gezondheid, milieu en veiligheid. In een veiligheidsbeheerssysteem krijgt ethiek doorgaans weinig aandacht. Hoe kan de veiligheidsprofessional hier iets aan doen?

Gas explosion accidents easily cause severe casualties in Chinese underground coal mines. Systematic analysis of accident causation is crucial for the prevention of gas explosions. This study identifies the representative risk factors of gas explosions and determines the interrelationship among these risk factors to highlight weak links and develop...

Safety climate and safety culture are important research domains in risk and safety science, and various industry and service sectors show significant interest in, and commitment to, applying its concepts, theories, and methods to enhance organizational safety performance. Despite the large body of literature on these topics, there are disagreement...

Barriers are used in various forms to assure the safety of chemical plants. A deep understanding of the literature related to safety barriers is essential to tackle the challenges in improving their design and management. This paper first provides an overview of the history of the development of the safety barrier concept. Subsequently, this paper...

Welke rol kunnen personeelsleden en studenten zelf opnemen in de beveiliging van hogeschool- en universiteitscampussen? De bijzondere eigenschappen van hogere onderwijsinstrellingen zorgen ervoor dat gesofisticeerde technologische beveiligingsmaatregelen vaak niet haalbaar of wenselijk zijn. Veel potentieel kan daarom toegeschreven worden aan de me...

Today, the need to deal with workplace security threats has become an important matter for many organisations. While companies have invested in technological and organization measures, the human processes behind these techniques are often ignored. However, employees’ awareness of security procedures and policy of the organisation may strengthen or...

Predicting the spatial distribution of direct economic losses from typhoon storm surge disasters is crucial for supporting emergency response efforts. Using case-based reasoning, we developed a preliminary method for completing predictions about the impact of typhoon storm surge disasters for multiple coastal regions. We proposed retrieval, reuse,...

Risk perception is important in organizational and societal governance contexts. This article presents a high-level analysis of risk perception research using Web of Science core collection databases, scientometrics methods and visualization tools. The focus is on trends in outputs, geographical and temporal trends, and patterns in the associated s...

The positive reception of Wang and Burris' photovoice method, published in 1997, has led to a proliferation of ways in which professionals deploy photovoice in a widening range of application fields, e.g., public health, social development and phenomenological research of human experiences. A scoping review method is used to obtain an overview of c...

The performance assessment of safety barriers is essential to find vulnerable elements in a safety barrier system. Traditional performance assessment approaches mainly focus on using several static indicators for quantifying the performance of safety barriers. However, with the increasing complexity of the system, emerging hazards are highly uncert...

This article presents a bibliometric analysis and mapping of the Chinese process safety research, focusing on the contributions made in core process safety journals and on the influences of international collaborations and knowledge sources on the developments of this research domain. Collaboration networks, term co-occurrence networks, and co-cita...

Typhoon storm surge disasters have garnered much attention because of their catastrophic damages. We investigated spatiotemporal patterns of typhoon storm surge disasters based on their tropical cyclone track clusters to support disaster mitigation in China. We aggregated 172 typhoon storm surge disasters in the entire cluster. Then, we used the ex...

When looking at socio-technical systems from a systems thinking and systemic perspective, it be-comes clear that mental models govern the behaviours and determine the achievements of so-cio-technical systems. This is also the case for individuals, being systems themselves and, as such, being elements of those socio-technical systems. Individual beh...

With the rapid urbanization, urban underground utility tunnels have seen fast growth in China in the past few years. Urban utility tunnels can house various kinds of city ‘lifelines’ such as natural gas pipeline, heat pipeline, water supply system, sewer pipeline, electricity and telecommunication cables, which are of great significance to guarante...

COVID-19 is an unprecedented pandemic that puts the entire world at stake and the healthcare systems across the globe have faced pressing challenges. The number of COVID-19 patients increases rapidly every day. The hospitals across many countries are starving to provide adequate service to the patients due to the shortage of resources and as a cons...

Today, the need to deal with workplace security threats has become an important matter for many organisations. While companies have invested in technological and organization measures, the human processes behind these techniques are often ignored. However, employees’ awareness of security procedures and policy of the organisation may strengthen or...

Some organisations, and some individual humans, violate moral and ethical rules, whether or not they are written down in laws or codes of conduct. Corporate transgressions, as this behaviour is called, occur because of the actions of those in charge, usually bright and dedicated people. Immoral and unethical conduct can adversely affect the safety...

In this study, we collected the data of 172 typhoon storm surge disasters that occurred in China during 1983–2018 to show the temporal and spatial distribution of their frequency and damage. Our results indicated that: (1) there was an increase in the frequency of typhoons storm surge disasters during 1983–2018, and 98% of these disasters occurred...

Accidents resulting in industrial fires in chemical and process installations and in industrial parks where relevant quantities of hazardous substances are stored or processed may cause domino effects. Probit models developed and used in a multitude of studies can provide the probability of equipment failure, but they do not consider the effect of...

Occupational Safety and Health is often poorly managed in micro-sized enterprises (MiSEs) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Previous studies have shown that employers in such enterprises do not conduct and/or regularly review workplace risk assessments, even though this is required by legislation. In other cases, they may conduct a superfici...

As a kind of clean fuel, increasing quantities of natural gas have been transported as liquefied natural gas (LNG) worldwide. The safety of LNG storage has gained the concerns from the public due to the potential severe consequences that may arise from LNG leakage. In this paper, a three-dimensional model with the combination of computational fluid...

The decision-making in risk management aims to select the best strategy of taking measures or allocating resources to reduce risks or prevent undesired damage. Domino effects bring considerable challenges to decision-making since they are high-consequence low probability events with complex evolution scenarios and high uncertainties. This chapter p...

OCI Nitrogen, one of Europe’s largest fertilizer producers, is investigating the extent to which it is possible to take targeted measures at an early stage and stop the development of major hazard accident processes. An innovative model has been developed and recently explained and elaborated in a number of publications. This current paper contains...

A disruption to hazardous (flammable, explosive, and toxic) material (HAZMAT) storage plants may trigger escalation effects, resulting in more severe storage performance losses and making the performance restoration more difficult. The disruption, such as an intentional attack, may be difficult to predict and prevent, thus developing a resilient HA...

Security of critical infrastructures has obtained increasing attention since the “9/11” attack in 2001. Unlike other critical infrastructures, intentional attacks on installations in the chemical sector may escalate, resulting in a chain of major accident scenarios, which are called intentional domino effects. In light of the severe consequences of...

This chapter presents a methodology to assess the probability of a domino effect due to pool fire and boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion (BLEVE). A computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based approach has been adopted to develop a wide range of scenarios. Unlike using the existing probit models, an empirical nonlinear equation has been developed...

Despite having an extremely lower frequency, domino accidents pose enormous losses in process industries when they occur. Over the years, rigorous efforts have been made to demystify the mechanism of domino accidents, assess the possibility of domino effect occurrence, set the thresholds for escalation vectors, and develop the polices to prevent su...

This paper presents a bibliometric overview of the publications in the principal international journal Process Safety and Environmental Protection (PSEP) from 1990 to 2020 retrieved in the Web of Science (WoS) database to explore the evolution in safety and environmental engineering design and practice, as well as experimental or theoretical innova...

There has been an increase in research into the security culture in organizations in recent years. This growing interest has been accompanied by the development of tools to measure the level of security culture in order to identify potential threats and formulate solutions. This article provides a systematic overview of the existing tools. A total...

Frequent water traffic accidents pose severe threats to human life and property safety, the water environment, and adverse effects on social stability. Understanding historical accidents is essential for accident prevention and risk mitigation. However, at present, research on the comprehensive statistical analysis of characteristics and causes of...

Identifying critical installations in an area containing many chemical installations is important for the safety management of the chemical area. In this study, the area impact degree of chemical installations is defined, which is determined by analyzing the probability of accidents at other installations in the area when an accident occurs at a gi...

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the trade-off between economics and epidemic prevention (safety) has become painfully clear worldwide. This situation thus highlights the significance of balancing the economy with safety and health. Safety economics, considering the interdependencies between safety and micro-economics, is ideal for supporting...

The chemical industry has an important role in our modern society. Due to the existence of hazardous materials and possible extreme producing conditions, chemical facilities are also considered dangerous. Research has pointed out that a successful attack on chemical plants may cause mass casualties, in the United States. Game theory has been employ...

Campussen van hogescholen en universiteiten en hun omgevingen hebben specifieke eigenschappen die zorgen voor grote uitdagingen op het vlak van criminaliteit, overlast, onveiligheidsbeleving en beveiliging en vereisen een aangepast beveiligingsmodel. Hoewel hoger onderwijsinstellingen vaak investeren in technologische maatregelen, zoals camerabewak...

De verspreiding van een virus volgt een complex scenario. Wat kan er beter bij het voorkomen van een pandemie? Wat is de rol van de veiligheidsprofessional? Welke instrumenten zijn er? Pandemie in kaart De kracht van bio-preventie ven. Dit levert een algemeen pandemie-scenario op, zie figuur 1.

Multiple factors contribute to occupational accidents including individual, job, environmental, organizational, and family issues. Most of them are latent factors and hard to model how and what extent they influence incidents occurrence. Although past research has included an occupational incident context, this attention has rarely provided a holis...

OCI Nitrogen wants to gain knowledge of (leading) indicators regarding the process safety performance of their ammonia production process. This paper answers the question whether indicators can be derived from the barrier system status to provide information about the development and likelihood of the major accident processes in the ammonia product...

In the chemical industry, multi-hazard (toxic, flammable, and explosive) materials such as acrylonitrile are stored, transported, and processed in large quantities. A release of multi-hazard materials can simultaneously or sequentially lead to acute toxicity, fire and explosion. The spatial-temporal evolution of hazards may also result in cascading...

In 2017, the Journal of Integrated Security Science was founded at the Safety and Security Science section at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Now, in 2021, we are happy to announce that we are rebranding the journal by taking it into an adjusted thematic and theoretical avenue: with a new journal name, a revised scope and updated e...