MERIT (Monaco Engineering Risk Integration Tool)

Onshore Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) is a technique widely used within the process industries to quantify the risks associated with the storage, use and transport of harmful substances such as petrochemicals. QRA assessments are computationally intensive involving the numerical analysis of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of hazard scenarios which must be processed sequentially to provide an overall risk profile of a given facility.

The sheer number of inputs and outputs makes carrying QRAs extremely difficult with manual calculation methods (e.g. spreadsheets) and therefore is almost always carried out by a specialist software tool.

MERIT is a comprehensive standalone onshore QRA risk assessment tool which has been developed entirely in-house at MES, specifically to carry out large scale onshore QRA assessments quickly and accurately.

MERIT functionality includes:

• Graphical "Point and click" or worksheet based data entry providing the user with a quick and easy way to model parameters with finer text based control if required.
• Fully integrated coloured LSIR contouring for quick and easy inclusion into reports, presentations etc, with the facility to export to external software such as Surfer of ArcMap GIS projects.
• F/N analysis for quantifying risk to offsite populations plotted internally within merit or exported as data for external manipulation (e.g. input and output data for MERIT are compatible with Microsoft Excel).
• Building exceedence calculations
• Automated risk transect generation
• Option of "Swept" or "Sectored" event footprints to give the user a choice of between quick approximate sectored contours for screening applications or detailed high resolution contours for publication quality reports, presentations etc.
• Extensive reporting/data export facilities

Other benefits include:

• Capable of very large simulation areas (Several kilometres)
• The only cross platform tool of its type, able to run on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.
• Standalone application developed in C++ for speed and portability