(287f) Psmsuite?an Intelligent System For Process Safety Management

Process safety management (PSM) has been regarded as the key to major chemical accident prevention. However, due to its complexity, few refineries and/or chemical plants can fully comply with the PSM standards such as the OSHA PSM standard 1910.119. That is one of the reasons that major chemical disasters such as the 2005’s BP Texas City refinery explosion are still wandering around the world, to my opinion. To improve the efficiency of business management, enterprise resources planning systems such as SAP have been developed and implemented in many big corporations. Nowadays, it would be unimaginable what will happen if all ERP systems were brought down. If information technology can work for business then it can work for process safety. In fact, many software products have been developed and available in the market place for a certain element of PSM or a few elements of PSM, for example, hazard and operability (HAZOP) analysis software, accident consequence modeling software, safety integrity level (SIL) validation software, compliance audit software and so on. However, a software product that tries to address all of the PSM elements is still not reported yet. To address this issue, a novel intelligent software platform PSMSuite has been developed at the author’s research center. Its flexible framework as well as its existing modules such as management of change (MOC) and pre-startup safety review (PSSR) modules is briefly described in this presentation. The ontology based case based reasoning technology for improving the consistency and thoroughness of the HAZOP　 results is demonstrated with a case study. The strategy for integrating HAZOP, layer of protection analysis (LOPA) and safety integrity level (SIL) validation is also explained for improving the reliability of risk analysis of operating facilities. A simplified Markov model has been developed for SIL validation. Comparison between this model and the full Markov model used in commercial software is also reported. Up to now, PSMSuite has been successfully commercialized and deployed in more than 20 big refineries and chemical/pharmaceutical plants in China. Future development is discussed in the conclusion session.