Industry 4.0 for Process Safety

Process safety is well suited to leverage the design principles of Industry 4.0. The holistic structure addresses the issues found in the Swiss Cheese model and will reduce the risk of major incidents.

In most cases major incidents are preceded by signals which if recognized would enable disaster to be avoided. After Three Mile Island, Charles Perrow wrote that these events are “unexpected, incomprehensible, uncontrollable and unavoidable” in his book “Normal Accidents.” Perrow’s statement may have been true when the book was published in 1984, as this was before sensors, large scale data storage, and analytic monitoring had been revolutionized. Today this is no longer the case.

With a High Reliability Organization culture we have the ability to dramatically reduce incidents and disasters in highly hazardous chemical process industries. This talk will focus on how an Industry 4.0 platform can provide a protective umbrella for the organization. We will explore the methods with use cases from multiple case studies.