Discrete Event Simulation in Support to Hydrogen Supply Reliability

Discrete Event Simulation (DES) environments are rapidly developing, and they appear to be promising tools for developing reliability and risk analysis models of safety-critical systems. DES models are an alternative to the conventional methods such as fault and event trees, Bayesian networks and cause-consequence diagrams that could be used to assess the reliability of fuel supply. DES models can rather easily account for the dynamic dimensions and other important features that can hardly be captured by the conventional models. The paper describes a novel approach to estimate gas supply security and the reliability/safety of gas installations, and argues that this approach can be transferred to estimate future hydrogen supply reliability. The core of the approach is a DES model of gas or other fuel propulsion through a pipeline to the customers and failures of the components of the pipeline. We will argue in the paper that the experience gained in the modelling of gas supply reliability is very relevant to the security and safety of a future hydrogen supply and worth being employed in this area.