Design support for the systematic integration of risk reduction into early chemical process design

Design for safety in the chemical industry is becoming a more explicit and well-organised process. However, it requires additional support tools to enable designers to pay attention to safety from the earliest conceptual design stage and through the subsequent detailing and to design more cost-effectively. This paper presents a more explicit approach called design for safety (DfS), which links with approaches already in use, such as layers of protection approach (LOPA). The method consists of two elements, a technology management environment (TME) aimed at supporting the interaction between the many contributors to safe design and a safety modelling language (SML). This provides a rigorous object-oriented language for conceptualising the requirements for risk control (barriers) and analysing their vulnerability to degradation or attack by other system elements or conditions. The method provides a focus for organising and applying existing knowledge about risk control and systematically learning from new knowledge to be gathered and supplied in supporting databases.