Fundamentals of safety conscious process design

An approach, to safety conscious chemical process design is described and illustrated. It is taken for granted that the way the process is represented has a profound influence upon the way process design is done. Thus safety conscious, process design can result only from a proper incorporation of safety into the process model. From this starting point a general purpose modeling language (the PSSP language) is introduced. The language is capable of unified object oriented representation of reality and of knowledge integration on that basis. Using the language chemical process is represented as an object having the generic list of four attributes: Purpose, Structure, State, and Performance. Safety is made an explicit property of process via Purpose, and environment is included as one of the structural parts of process via Structure. Finally Process object is associated with Design and Management activity objects to make up a mutually communicating set of the three objects called design cycle representing safety conscious process design. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.