Safety Lifecycle Management In The Process …

1 ASafety Lifecycle Management In The Process IndustriesThe development of a qualitative Safety -related information analysis techniquebCopyright 2002 by B. KnegteringCIP-DATA LIBRARY TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT EINDHOVENK negtering, BerendSafety Lifecycle Management in the Process industries : the development of a qualitativesafety-related information analysis technique / by Berend Knegtering. Eindhoven :Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, 2002. Proefschrift. -ISBN 90-386-1747-XNUGI 684 Keywords: Safety Lifecycle Management / Safety Management systems / Lifecyle models / Safety instrumental systems / Process Safety / Maturity index on reliabilityPrinted by: University Press Facilities, EindhovencSafety Lifecycle Management In The Process IndustriesThe development of a qualitative Safety -related information analysis techniquePROEFSCHRIFTter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan deTechnische Universiteit Eindhoven, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus, van Santen, voor eencommissie aangewezen door het College voor Promoties in het openbaar te verdedigenop vrijdag 17 mei 2002 om uurdoorBerend Knegteringgeboren te EindhovendDit proefschrift is goedgekeurd door de RouvroyeISummaryIn spite of the application of a wide variety of safeguarding measures, many accidents inthe Process industries still happen today.

2 Experiences gained from these past accidentshave led to the development of an increasing number of technical solutions. One of thebest known and widely accepted technical solutions concerns the use of Safety -instrumented Systems (SIS). In order to control the design and implementation of thesetechnical solutions, numerous Safety -related standards have been written. These safetystandards are comprised of technology-oriented requirements concerning adequate implementation of the designed solutions. Consequently, compliance with these standardsis often considered to be good engineering practice . Compliance with these technicalstandards, however, did not prevent several major accidents.

3 As a result of thecontinuously growing complexity of both industrial processes and the related Safety -instrumented systems, it appears that new kinds of problems have arisen [Kne00b],[Kne01]. As this thesis will show, many of these specific problems are related to thecontrol of Safety -related business of recent studies on incidents and accidents showed problems regarding thequality of information on potential accidents and the related technological , adequate control of the quality of Safety -related information seems to be ofessential importance if realization of an acceptable Safety level is to be achieved. As ananswer to solve these problems related to business processes, recent standards on SIS havedefined Safety Lifecycle models.

4 Safety Lifecycle models are considered to form anadequate framework to identify, allocate, structure, and control Safety -relatedrequirements. Standards on SIS often specify Lifecycle phases of these models in terms ofobjectives, required inputs, and required outputs. A description of the objectives, inputsand outputs characterizes these aspects. It appears, however, that characterization itself isnot always good enough to adequately achieve the defined objectives. This resulted in thedefinition of the following research questions. The first question concerns the way inwhich Lifecycle models can be used to improve Safety -related business processes. It issubsequently questioned what exactly is included in each phase, and which other factorsdetermine the quality of the objectives to be achieved in each phase.

5 The third researchquestion is how the Lifecycle phases are mutually related, and how the quality of thecompletion of one phase influences the quality of the passing through of a subsequentphase, and how the quality of information exchanged between Lifecycle phases could becontrolled. A fourth question that arose during the research performed in this thesis is howto measure these quality aspects in order to be able to control the Process industries, Process Safety Management (PSM) embodies the whole ofmeasures and activities to achieve an acceptable safe operating Process installation. Thisincludes the control of the Safety -related business processes. Obviously, it needs to beknown how these business processes can be controlled.

6 Therefore, it needs to beestablished which aspects or parameters influence these processes and can subsequently beused to control them. This implies that measurement and analysis of the parameter valuesshould result in the necessary information in order to take appropriate control actions. Anessential question that needed to be answered was which parameters are most relevant tobe controlled. To answer this question, the PSM involved business processes which wereIIdivided into the elementary Safety -related activities. For each of these activities, the mostrelevant parameters that influence the performance of the involved activity wereestablished based on the key performance indicator as used in the field of reliabilityinformation Management .

7 This resulted in the development of the Safety -related ActivityManagement or SAM model. In order to control the performance of the involved activitythe values of these parameters must be measured and of the fact that the activities as part of PSM are interrelated to each other, theperformance of one activity directly influences the performance of other activities. Thesafety Lifecycle model was used to establish the relationship between the involved Safety -related activities. This resulted in the development of the Safety Lifecycle ActivityManagement or SLAM model. This model describes the information flows between thesafety-related activities that need to be realized. The application and control of the PSMrelated business processes, as based on the concepts of the SAM and SLAM models, iscaptured by the term Safety Lifecycle Management (SLM).

8 SLM is defined as: theintegral control of the Safety Management activities with regard to all phases of the safetylifecycle. The control is based on the application of a structured Safety Lifecycle model,which is the framework on which the Safety Management system is established. To adequately control the SLM activities, proper information must be available and thus anumber of information flows is required. The research described in this thesisdemonstrates that the quality of information flows directly influences the control of Safety -related business processes. It is therefore demonstrated that qualification of informationflows substantially helps to control Safety -related business processes. In order to developqualification criteria of Safety -related information flows, concepts of reliability-relatedinformation Management techniques (the MIR (Maturity Index on Reliability) concept) areadapted for the specific application of controlling Safety -related on the SLM concepts and on the MIR concept, the formalized MIR-based SLManalysis technique has been developed.

9 This analysis technique consists of 7 steps that ledto the detection and explanation of Safety -related problems that might result in an of the main steps in the MIR-based SLM analysis technique is the development ofsafety-related activity and information flowcharts. The application of Safety lifecyclemodels clearly structures the development of these application of the analysis technique proves that indeed a reasonable explanation ofsafety-related information transfer problems could be given for problems which otherwisewere difficult to explain or unexplainable. Based on eleven industrial case studies, thesesafety Lifecycle model based activity flowcharts have proven to be a valuable means toexplain the observed problems.

10 It is concluded that the application of the SLM conceptstogether with formalized MIR-based SLM analysis technique enables an organization toallocate weaknesses in the control of Safety -related business processes. It offers the abilitynot just to learn from accidents that have actually occurred, but more important to serve asa means to prevent these accidents from occurring. Latent problems within the safetymanagement system are traced much earlier, and can subsequently be resolved before theyresult in serious general, it was expected that the theoretical principles of SLM and the conceptual stepsof the formalized MIR-based SLM analysis technique could be very well applied to otherindustrial sectors. The MIR theory that has been adopted (and adapted) from itsdevelopment area, namely the consumer products industry, immediately demonstrated itsIIIapplicability in a different industrial sector.