Abstract
There has been a recent surge in the number of disasters and incidents occurring in the process industry (e.g., the petrochemical, chemical, food and pharmaceutical industries). The reasons thereof include defects in process safety management (PSM); inadequate safety management systems in companies; inadequate knowledge among managers and insufficient information about the tasks undertaken and resultant erroneous operation and/or misjudgment; no standardization for the PSM activity; and other engineering factors. The purpose of PSM is to prevent industrial accidents by the establishment of the PSM system at the company level as well as an improvement in safety engineering techniques. Safety of chemical process plants can be achieved throughout the plant-lifecycle engineering (Plant-LCE), which is performed from research and development until to plant safety design, construction, and manufacturing (production and maintenance) stages. For systematic PSM, a model-based engineering framework is needed so that information can be used to inform all stages of the plant-lifecycle. Constantly updated and revised data and information must be shared at each engineering stage in a transparent way in order to examine the impacts of the safety decisions in all activities of the chemical process plant. The present paper reviews the existing studies on business process models, which have been developed for the process industrial activities, and introduces an integrated PSM framework which makes it possible to realize a consistent and collaborative PSM.
