Exploiting near Misses to Revive Safety Knowledge in Process Plants

In mature industries, a terrific knowledge about safety is hidden in regulations, standard codes and good practices, as well as in proprietary procedures. The study of near misses may be used to rediscover and to revive this knowledge. Internal proprietary knowledge and external public domain knowledge have been discriminated. For the proprietary knowledge the right pieces of procedures are searched trough a backward path along safety digital model, which is able to represent all the links between equipment and safety documents, within the safety management system. For the formal external knowledge, a semantic search was used. Safety matter has been organized in taxonomies used both to find the key words in the near miss report and to match them within the mess of public documents.