Quantitative inherent safety assessment by Key Performance Indicators

The effective design of process systems based on the strategies of inherent safety asks for practical, reliable and systematic assessment tools. Despite the valuable procedures proposed in the literature, relevant biases in the outcomes may be introduced in the analysis when general scoring techniques or subjective judgment are adopted to a large extent. The present study introduces a consequence-based method for the inherent safety assessment of process systems. The output of the analysis is a metric (a set of Key Performance Indicators, KPIs) which provides a sound and reproducible quantification of the inherent safety fingerprint of the system considered. The analysis is particularly suitable for application in the preliminary project development stages, and may be applied to large industrial applications as well as to small and medium scale facilities.