ABB’s recently introduced SafetyInsight solution is helping customers operating high hazard processes to reduce production losses, lower maintenance costs and optimise safety and compliance
The suite of digital software applications supports companies across the energy and process sectors throughout the entire lifecycle of process safety management (PSM).
Operating as a central source of information the software digitalises early engineering technology (ET) data to create a process safety digital twin, using this data to then give context to the vast amount of data generated through IT and OT systems. Karl Watson from ABB says: “Companies operating in high hazard industries invest significant time and effort developing the basis of safety during the engineering phase of a facility. This critical knowledge is then often left ‘on-the-shelf’, leaving operation and maintenance teams to ‘re-invent the wheel’ when it comes to understanding the hazards and risks associated with their processes.”
Taking this approach of combing IT and OT data with ET data, SafetyInsight enables valuable engineering data (such as HAZOP and LOPA reports) to be digitalised and readily accessible by operation and maintenance teams in simplified, intuitive and easy to understand visual formats.
Ongoing risk assessments can then be based on digitalised safety data. The addition of the IT/OT data provides near real time updates, enabling the accumulative impact of operation and maintenance activities to be visualized on a dynamic risk matrix, to further aid risk assessments and management of operational risk.
Watson adds: “Engineering technology data, like any digital twin, must be validated. SafetyInsight facilitates this by capturing actual operation and maintenance data in context with the early design assumptions, enabling improvement to be identified and implemented, in other words, ‘closing the loop’.”
