Information needs and challenges in future process safety

Abstract

The rapid advances occurring within the “Era of Big Data” and Industry 4.0 concepts are providing opportunities and challenges for improving business outcomes within the process industries especially in terms of process safety management (PSM). To ensure potential affordances are leveraged and potential limitations and risks are identified and addressed, a structured approach for identifying opportunities and challenges for people, plant and procedures could be beneficial. A literature review revealed that for process safety management there is a gap associated with exploring the utility of frameworks that facilitate a structured approach for thinking about data, information, knowledge and wisdom from a people, plant and procedures perspective. This article explores work done to answer the research question – Can the data-information-knowledge-wisdom-action (DIKWA) cycle and people-plant-procedures (P3) model help identify important considerations associated with ‘Big Data’ applications within the process industries especially in terms of process safety management? We apply these frameworks to an industry case study on high temperature hydrogen attack and find that it revealed insights into options for and affordances and limitations associated with adopting ‘Big Data’ technology and tools. The implications of these insights for process safety management are discussed then recommendations are made about future research which includes the need to use this work to inform the development of a useful and usable knowledge processing model for process safety applications.