Design and development of intelligent decision support system for safety management in process industries

Abstract

Many activities related to process plants pose a lot of risk to the people in the plants and to the surrounding community For the safe operation of the plants early detection of component failure and excursions of variables outside the acceptable bounds is of paramount importance Generally the process plants are designed to operate safely under normal conditions however improper operation can lead to equipment failure and release of potentially hazardous materials This necessitates continuous monitoring of various parameters of the plant on real time basis Usually the technical personnel are assigned the job of monitoring the plant for the safe operation They may require to monitor a number of variables for identification of normal and abnormal operations and also to follow the safety guidelines and procedures Since a person cannot monitor all variables simultaneously an automated approach is needed for the real time monitoring of the plant