Knock-on accident prevention in a chemical cluster

Empirical research has revealed that safety managers acknowledge the importance of cross-company cooperation for knock-on risk reduction. This paper presents a decision support software tool, called DomPrevPlanning©, to prevent knock-on or domino accidents. The computer automated toolkit only requires simple input data to identify the weak spots in an industrial area. This way, a ranking list is generated, indicating where to take safety and security measures in a complex chemical surrounding consisting of hundreds of chemical installations. The software is tested on a real-case sub-cluster from the Antwerp chemical cluster, the second largest chemical cluster in the world.