Safety assessment of personnel in defense infrastructure

The safety of personnel, relevant threat scenarios and structural protection are key issues of the five-year research programme “Personnel Safety” initiated by the Dutch MOD and carried out by TNO. The aim is to develop a balanced methodology to assess the safety of personnel, in relation to ammunition and explosion effects. The scope is restricted to personnel within Defence infrastructure.
The research programme has a modular set-up and describes the entire chain of events from donor (e.g. an explosion in the ammunition storage) to acceptor (e.g. compound infrastructure). In this chain, infrastructural protection as well as the potential secondary threat by building damage is taken into account. The results are expressed in terms of injury levels for groups of personnel. Details on human vulnerability modelling are given in a companion paper (van der Horst et al., 2006).
While considerable effort is spent to further development of the source and effect models (both for structures and persons), the integration of the various modules has special focus within the research programme. As each module has a different modelling level and accuracy, probabilistic techniques are necessary to incorporate the modules consistently. In particular, the Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) technique is used to build high-level models for each separate module. The BBN-technique has the advantage that quantitative and qualitative aspects can be combined in a single model and that the accuracy of the output of the model chain is not determined by the least accurate link. Another advantage is that the level of modelling with the BBN allows for the identification of knowledge gaps and other ‘white spots’ in the methodology and as such can guide the further knowledge development within the programme.