Abstract: Seeing that over-concentrated risk sources involved in production process and storage have resulted in frequent occurrence of domino accidents, the authors of this paper started studying optimization of the layout of barriers for the purpose of preventing accident expansion. On the basis of starting a pool fire as the primary accident, possible secondary accidents were screened and their extending probabilities were calculated. Taking into account the possible failure of barriers and their effectiveness in reducing thermal radiation when operating successfully, the effects of barriers acting on the risk sources were quantitatively assessed. With all the calculation results obtained, a decision model was built for solving the problem of how to set barriers at limited cost for a given enterprise in order that the probabilities of domino accidents can be minimized. Finally, by using the model, an optimal safety barriers layout scheme was designed for a factory producing methionine taken as an example. This study proves that reasonable arrangement of safety barrier can prevent domino accident effectively.

Key words: safety barrier, domino effect, optimize decision making, source of risk, fire, chemical enterprise