Understanding and combating design error in process plant design

The paper starts with a brief description of typical stages in of the design process in the process industry and some of its crucial characteristics. It then moves on to give an account of root causes of design errors. This section makes considerable use of cases from the author’s professional experience and culminates in a classification of design error. The final section of the paper gives a brief review of tools for combating error. It is acknowledged that no one method or combinations of methods are capable of identifying all design errors. Further studies of the design process itself are proposed in order to make it less error prone.