ABSTRACT
Natech is a technological accident which is triggered by a natural disaster. Increasing frequency of natural disasters along with an increasing growth of industrial plants are bound to increase the risk of Natechs in the future. Due to a lack of accurate field observations and empirical data, risk assessment of Natechs has largely been reliant on experts opinion and thus prone to epistemic uncertainty in addition to aleatory uncertainty originating from randomness of natural disasters. Evidential Network (EN) is a directed acyclic graph based on Dempster-Shafer Theory to explicitly model the propagation of epistemic uncertainty in system safety and reliability assessment. In the present study, we have illustrated an application of EN to handling epistemic uncertainty in risk assessment of flood-induced floatation of storage tanks.
