A preventive optimization framework is proposed to find the optimal operation that can avoid plant shutdown in the case of unexpected equipment failures in the utility system. To find the optimal solution in terms of both operation cost reduction and emergency handling capability improvement, emergency handling constraints that consider the present system's capability of avoiding plant shutdown by performing predetermined emergency response actions are incorporated into the conventional optimization model. To verify the proposed approach, simulation case studies were performed and their results were compared with those of the equal load allocation method and the conventional optimization approach. The simulation results show that the proposed approach successfully handles the emergency situation with reduced total cost by simultaneous consideration of process robustness and operating cost, This idea can be generally applied to other processes by adopting appropriate emergency handling constraints into the optimization formulations.