Simulation and uniform design-based automatic generation of risk scenarios

This paper presents a methodology for automatically generating risk scenarios for dynamic reliability applications in which some dynamic characteristics (e.g., the order, timing and magnitude of events, the value of relevant process parameters and initial conditions) have a significant influence on the evolution of the system. The main idea of the methodology is: (i) making the system model "express itself" through simulation by having the model driven by an elaborated simulation engine; (ii) exploiting uniform design to pick out a small subset of representative design points from the space of relevant dynamic characteristics; (iii) for each selected design point, employing a depth-first systematic exploration strategy to cover all possible scenario branches at each branch point. A highly dynamic example adapted from the literature (a chemical batch reactor) is studied to test the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.