Plant functional modelling as a basis for assessing the impact of management on plant safety

A major objective of the present work is to provide means for representing a chemical process plant as a socio-technical system, so as to allow hazard identification at a high level in order to identify major targets for safe ty development. The main phases of the methodology are: (1) preparation of a plant functional model where a set of plant functions describes coherentl y hardware, software, operations, work organization and other safety relate d aspects. The basic principle is that any aspect of the plant can be repre sented by an object based upon an Intent and associated with each Intent ar e Methods, by which the Intent is realized, and Constraints, which limit th e Intent. (2) Plant level hazard identification based on keywords/checklist s and the functional model. (3) Development of incident scenarios and selec tion of hazardous situation with different safety characteristics. (4) Eval uation of the impact of management on plant safety through interviews. (5) Identification of safety critical ways of action in the management system, i.e. identification of possible error- and violation-producing conditions. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.