Natural gas is known as a hazardous fuel that could cause human casualties, especially in urban areas. For this reason, assessing the consequences of natural gas pipeline ruptures is settled as an important element in determining the potential effects of such ruptures on human health and developing risk management programs for natural gas networks. Several efforts have been made in the literature to establish potential consequence areas; however, there are many limitations on the methodologies proposed so far; or alternatively, consequence analyses have been performed in specific cases using a defined location, but not along a natural gas distribution network. The model proposed in this research consists of two main components: (i) a spatial assessment of gas dispersion through the ALOHA software to obtain the potential impact areas, and (ii), the count of the number of individual people located within the potential impact areas through a geographic information system (GIS) model, which proves to be a valuable tool for assessing the consequences of natural gas distribution networks. The proposed model has been applied on a case study to validate the ability to quantify the number of people exposed per linear meter of pipeline, and provide the opportunity to relatively assess the level of consequences of the pipeline network.

天然气被认为是一种危险燃料，可能导致人员伤亡，尤其是在城市地区。因此，评估天然气管道破裂的后果被认为是确定此类破裂对人类健康的潜在影响和制定天然气管网风险管理计划的重要因素。文献中已经做出了一些努力来确定潜在的后果领域；然而，迄今为止提出的方法存在许多局限性；或者，在特定情况下使用指定位置（但不是沿着天然气分配网络）进行后果分析。本研究提出的模型由两个主要部分组成：(i) 通过 ALOHA 软件对气体扩散进行空间评估，以获得潜在影响区域；(ii) 计算潜在影响范围内的人数事实证明，地理信息系统（GIS）模型是评估天然气分配网络后果的宝贵工具。所提出的模型已应用于案例研究，以验证量化每延米管道暴露人数的能力，并提供相对评估管网后果水平的机会。