(87b) The Future of Hazard Analysis and Big Data: With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility

Over the course of the history of process safety and security, various efforts have been made to help automate, streamline and improve the Hazard Analysis studies of process hazard analysis (PHA) and security risk assessment (SRA). These improvement efforts include industry standards, computer software, corporate and industry guidelines for the studies as well as other improvements. Recent efforts have been made to improve and automate Hazard Analyses with the introduction of machine learning/ automated intelligence. These improvements range from very simple models and tools such as drop down lists for text selection all the way to very complex methods that use machine learning to partially or fully automate the hazard identification and analysis process.

In this paper, we will discuss various methods that can be used to automate the Hazard Analysis processes for PHA and SRA that will improve and streamline the processes as well as make them more efficient. We will discuss potential benefits to these methods as well as potential drawbacks. We also will discuss how we see the future of conducting Hazard Analyses and the role that humans will play in these studies in the future.