Chemical sector is a critical infrastructure for US[i]. Chemical facilities - small companies to national laboratories use, manufacture, store, and deliver chemicals in a complex and highly interconnected global chain. Other critical infrastructure as listed by US Department of Homeland Security are highly dependent on chemical supply chains. Hence, reliability and sustainability of chemical supply chain is very important to smooth functioning of the economy[ii]. Process safety engineering is the study of hazards and risks in the chemical process industry and deals with the prevention and mitigation of the risks. The concept of process safety has grown exponentially during the last two decades. The reliability of manufacturing, storage and transportation echelons of chemical supply chain is highly dependent on the process hazards[iii]. The main chemical hazards are fires, explosion, toxic exposure, dust explosion and runaway reactions. Geographic Information System (GIS) is very intuitive and versatile mapping tool for supply chain planning and has been highly utilized in supplier selection, route planning and facility locations problems both academic as well as industry[iv]. This work proposes a GIS-based framework to calculate the process safety risks as well as modeling and optimization of the supply chain. The framework generates trade-off optimal solutions for competing objectives of risks and profit of the chemical supply chain. The framework is demonstrated by applying to an example case study which resulted in several non-intuitive observations. ESRI’s ArcGIS Pro is used as the application software for GIS.<br/><br/>

Framework for integrating GIS to analyze and optimize the process safety in chemical supply chains

ACS Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.