Intelligent systems for HAZOP analysis of complex process plants

Process safety, occupational health and environmental issues are ever increasing in importance in response to heightening public concerns and the resultant tightening of regulations. The process industries are addressing these concerns with a systematic and thorough process hazards analysis (PHA) of their new, as well as existing facilities. Given the enormous amounts of time, effort and money involved in performing the PHA reviews, there exists considerable incentive for automating the process hazards analysis of chemical process plants. In this paper, we review the progress in this area over the past few years. We also discuss the progress that has been made in our laboratory on the industrial application of intelligent systems for operating procedure synthesis and HAZOP analysis. Recent advances in this area have promising implications for process hazards analysis, inherently safer design, operator training and real-time fault diagnosis. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.