Petroleum refining system is complex, non-linear, multivariate with a number of highly correlated process units. Petrochemical units are potentially prone to incidents that have catastrophic consequences such as explosion, leakage of toxic materials, and the stoppage of the production process. There exist strong nonlinear dynamic fault behaviors during fault propagation in petroleum refining system. Although fault propagation scenario-based accident analysis can be an effective means to help operators to find the root causes of the current abnormal event, it has not yet been analyzed from the resilience engineering (RE) perspective. Resilience engineering is a new method that can control incidents and limit their consequences. In this paper, hierarchical fault propagation model (HFPM) is proposed as an extension of the Infrastructure Resilience-Oriented Modeling Language (IRML). The main contribution that consists in the design of HFPM is to incorporate the dynamic behavior of fault propagation. The model is divided into two parts. The first part is static analysis for system structure features and the second part is dynamic analysis for fault evolution mechanism. The performance of the proposed model has been tested on atmospheric and vacuum distillation system. Based on the case study results illustrated in this paper, the proposed method can be used for fault propagation and control strategy analysis in petroleum refining system from the resilience engineering perspective and also be beneficial to the design and modifications of process plants which will enhance the process safety. (C) 2015 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.