A review of safety indices for process design

Roy, Nitin; Eljack, Fadwa; Jiménez‐Gutiérrez, Arturo; Bin, Zhang; Thiruvenkataswamy, Preetha; El‐Halwagi, Mahmoud M.; Mannan, M. Sam

doi:10.1016/j.coche.2016.07.001

Cited by 94 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…It should be recognized that other more nuanced methods, that also use risk indices, exist and are meanwhile applied in the process and petrochemical industry; these nuanced methods were not referred to among our consulted sources, as explained in Section 2, materials and methods. Some examples that sometimes lead to richer interpretations of safety are: (i) the inherent safety index [56], which assesses the principles of inherent safety, being minimization, moderation, substitution and simplification; the (ii) safety weighted hazard index, which assesses a process unit of an industry by simultaneously evaluating hazards and hazard control measures [57]; or (iii) fuzzy indices that account for uncertainties in hazard and risk calculations [56].…”

Section: Reflections On Quantitative Methods and Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Complexity-Thinking Methods Contribute to Improving Occupational Safety in Industry 4.0? A Review of Safety Analysis Methods and Their Concepts

Adriaensen

Decré

Pintelon

2019

Safety

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With the introduction of Industry 4.0, occupational health and safety finds itself confronted with new types of hazards. Many Industry 4.0 innovations involve increased machine intelligence. These properties make socio-technical work in Industry 4.0 applications inherently more complex. At the same time, system failure can become more opaque to its users. This paper reviews and assesses safety analysis methods as the breakdown of interaction coupling in socio-technical systems on the one hand, and the degree of failure tractability on the other hand; the latter being used as a proxy for complexity. Previous literature confirms that traditional health and safety risk assessment methods are unable or are ‘ill-equipped’ to deal with these system properties. This paper studies the need to introduce new paradigms and safety methods related to complexity thinking with theories borrowed from the study of complex adaptive systems, all to assess the arena of abruptly changing hazards introduced by Industry 4.0. At the same time, this review makes clear that there is no one-solution-fits-all method. Occupational health and safety (OHS) covers many different hazard types and will need a combination of old, new and yet-to-be-developed safety assessment methods.

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Section: Reflections On Quantitative Methods and Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Complexity-Thinking Methods Contribute to Improving Occupational Safety in Industry 4.0? A Review of Safety Analysis Methods and Their Concepts

Adriaensen

Decré

Pintelon

2019

Safety

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“…There are different tools to evaluate a process in terms of safety performance. Among the most popular ones are the hazard and operability (HAZOP) method and the quantitative risk assessment (QRA) (Roy et al, 2016). The HAZOP method is a qualitative tool that requires detailed information about the process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As an alternative to these tools, safety indices have been developed to consider process characteristics that may result in potential incidents (Roy et al, 2016). The first index reported in the literature was the Dow's fire and explosion index (F&EI).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison of safety indexes for chemical processes under uncertainty

Ortiz‐Espinoza

Jiménez‐Gutiérrez

El‐Halwagi

et al. 2021

Process Safety and Environmental Protection

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The fatal consequences of industrial incidents have made evident the need for suitable tools to develop inherently safer process designs. Traditionally, in a process design project, the evaluation of safety aspects is left for analysis after the detailed design has been completed. This approach leads to the use of control loops, barriers and protection layers as the only ways to prevent incidents and to reduce the possible outcomes. An alternative to this approach is the application of the concept of inherent safety, which was introduced to set up several principles that aim to enhance process safety by eliminating, avoiding or minimizing sources of risk. In this work, we present a comparison of different safety metrics in their role to evaluate the risk associated with a given process design. The indices selected for consideration are better applied at the conceptual stage of the process design, and they were the Dow's fire and explosion index (F&EI), the fire and explosion damage index (FEDI), the process route index (PRI) and the process stream index (PSI). All these indices use different input information and their outcomes have different rankings. The metrics were applied to an ethylene production process to identify risk levels, and the location of streams and pieces of equipment that pose the highest risk within the process. An evaluation of the indices in their capability to track design changes in operating conditions aiming to improve the safety level of the process was developed. To perform the assessment of the safety metrics in a more extensive manner, an uncertainty analysis based on a Monte Carlo simulation framework was implemented and compared to the traditional use of single-value design variables. Within this context, an insightful assessment of uncertainty's effect on process safety characteristics was achieved because of the identification of ranges of safetyrelevant performance outcomes (zones of risks and opportunities) that can be probabilistically characterized. The approach was applied to a case study related to the production of ethylene from shale gas. The results showed how some indexes are better suited to capture the risk characteristics associated with the process when changes in the operating conditions of the section with highest risk were implemented. The methodology can be extended to other processes of interest, and may serve as a basis for the safety and process design community to propose adjustments in the structure of the safety indices based on a better understanding of their performance and reliability as part of the efforts towards the continued improvement of those safety metrics.

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“…Al-Douri et al (2020) introduced an economic framework for mitigating operational failure by considering reliability, availability, and maintainability. Park et al (2020) and Roy et al (2016) provided recent literature surveys on the use of safety in process design.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%