Incorporating inherent safety during the conceptual process design stage: A literature review

Abstract This paper reviews principal concepts, tools, and metrics for risk management and Inherently Safer Design (ISD) during the conceptual stage of process design. Even though there has been a profusion of papers regarding ISD, the targeted audience has typically been safety engineers, not process engineers. Thus, the goal of this paper is to enable process engineers to use all the available design degrees of freedom to mitigate risk early enough in the design process. Mainly, this paper analyzes ISD and inherent safety assessment tools (ISATs) from the perspective of inclusion in conceptual process design. The paper also highlights the need to consider safety as a major component of process sustainability. In this paper, 73 ISATs were selected, and these tools were categorized into three groups: hazard-based inherent safety assessment tools (H-ISATs) for 22 tools, risk-based inherent safety assessment tools (R-ISATs) for 33 tools, and cost-optimal inherent safety assessment tools (CO-ISATs) for 18 tools. This paper also introduces an integrated framework for coordinating the conventional process design workflow with safety analysis at various levels of detail.