Like many countries around the world, Italy is a country exposed to natural hazards that trigger technological disasters (NaTech) that can cause fires, explosions and release toxic substances within industrial facilities. These disasters often pose grave concerns for the human lives directly in contact, namely, the plant workers. In this respect, IUSS Pavia, the Eucentre Foundation and the University of Milan, in collaboration with the Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL), are collaborating to work on the design, implementation and testing of a prototype system for risk-aware navigation to manage and mitigate seismic risk in industrial plants at risk of NaTech accidents, entitled ROSSINI. For a given seismic shaking detected at an industrial plant, the system furnishes a real-time risk map for plant workers to use, and be navigated by, to safely egress via the safest (i.e., minimal risk) route automatically calculated by the system. Risks such as damage to piping systems, industrial structures, tanks, storage vessels and buildings, in general, are considered and the possibility of toxic substances being released and diffused into the local atmosphere.

A vital part of the ROSSINI system is the integration of risk estimates obtained from a classic fragility approach with a multi-sensor array. In the fragility approach, the probability of a given damage threshold, and subsequent consequence, can be estimated from a database of precompiled fragility and consequence functions and relayed to plant workers via the risk map. Furthermore, the provision of a series of smart sensors intends to directly measure and detect damage in critical parts of the industrial facility. These measurements are anticipated to increase efficiency and improve the reliability of the real-time risk estimates sent to plant workers via the ROSSINI system map.