Criticality Assessment Of Oil Spill Accident In Three Gorges Reservoir Area And Emergency Response Decision Support System Development

Due to their potential damage to environment and society is huge, oil spill accidents of ships have been taken seriously by governments all over the world. China has also joined in several international conventions on combating pollution of the ocean by oil, made and taken all levels of oil spill contingency plan and program into practice.In recent years, oil transportation through the upper Changjiang River has been growing swiftly with the development of western area's economy. Under this circumstance, an oil spill response drill in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area was held by Changjiang Marine Safety Agency together with Science Research Academy of the Ministry of Communications. This drill has set an important example for the establishment of the oil spill response system of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area.After report of an oil spill incident come to the Response organization, infotmation about the incident, i.e. reason of the incident, place of the incident and the source of spilled oil, should be assessed to know the potential scale of the incident and whether there will be a danger of fire and explosion, or any damage will be done to human kind and public security. This is critical in decision-making of dealing with the incident.The assessment of an oil spill incident is related to many factors like oil kind, ship itself, environment and human, which involve much uncertainty, so it is feasible to use Fuzzy Inference and Neural Network to assess the danger of an oil spill incident and use the result to support the decision making of response staff. The indices include influences on environment sensitive resources, oil characteristics influence, the state of the ship and the capability of the response organization. Oil spill response expert system takes the assessment result, the environment information and the capability of the response organization into consideration and then offers supporting plan for response. This system can also be used as a training system or in response drill.With the Neural Network toolbox and Fuzzy Inference (FI) toolbox, MATLAB can make the corresponding models easily, thus set designers free from tedious computer programming and improve efficiency by making them pay most attention toproblem solving. However, MATLAB cannot run without its compiling environment and its GUI function is relatively rough compared to Visual Basic. So, when combining MATLAB toolbox and VB GUI development together, the oil spill response decision support system can be integrated seamlessly.