MONITORING AND ANALYSIS OF HAZARDS USING HAZOP-BASED PLANT SAFETY MODEL

When a new industrial system is designed, lots of information about it is collected in various documents. The use of modem CAD technology ma kes it possible to create an object-oriented description of the system with its physical structure and characteristics. Safety and reliabili ty analyses are carried out during the design using various methods, t ypically HAZOP. Later, when the system has been constructed and taken into use, new information is created when malfunctions are diagnosed a nd controlled. The information sources mentioned here contain such inf ormation that could prove very useful to the operating personnel at a plant with the aid of an appropriate information system. A Nordic proj ect to develop an information system to support process risk managemen t is described. The safety analysis module is a HAZOP documentation to ol which stores the information in a structured database. The idea of the disturbance analysis module is to make those safety analysis resul ts which are relevant in the monitored situation available to operatin g personnel and to provide a tool for the recording of operating exper iences. The discharge monitoring module aims to extend the number of t he top-level process operation goals to include the minimizing of envi ronmental discharges and pollution by using intelligent process models .