TRIAL OF THE 'HAZID' TOOL FOR COMPUTER-BASED HAZOP EMULATION ON A MEDIUM-SIZED INDUSTRIAL PLANT

摘要

The HAZID knowledge-based system was developed as part of the EC-funded "STOPHAZ" project, whose brief was to investigate the use of software tools for improving safety in chemical process plants. HAZID models the behaviour of a plant qualitatively, so that the potential hazards of equipment failures can be detected. The models in HAZID are based around the signed directed graph, and hazard identification is driven by a systematic HAZOP-style examination of the causes of all process variable deviations in the model. The potential causes are found by considering all possible fault propagation paths in the plant model being considered, using exhaustive graph search techniques. This paper describes a trial of the HAZID software on the design information from a real medium-sized plant, which has been built and is currently in operation. The objectives were to demonstrate electronic transfer of plant design data from the client's CAD database system to HAZID, to present the results of the HAZID analysis in a structured form as a spreadsheet file, and to show that this type of search-oriented knowledge based system can perform well on a much larger test case plant than had previously been attempted. The trial was successful in respect of each of these objectives, and also provided valuable information to guide future development of the system, which we hope will be made possible by increased interest from potential customers for the HAZID tool.