Cost–benefit analysis approach for the management of industrial safety in chemical and petrochemical industry

The high complexity of chemical and petrochemical installations determines a complex safety management of these establishments, therefore, there is a need to find innovative solutions to guarantee the prevention of failures and losses of containment from process equipment. In this frame, the use of the API Risk Based Inspection (RBI) assessment approach permits a significant reduction of maintenance costs and, simultaneously, the increase of plant's reliability and availability. To increase the level of industrial safety, a proper selection of measures is also needed, even if the adoption of such measures poses costs. Given that resources for the companies are usually limited, a comparison amongst various solutions has to be done with the aim to find the best one, based on a comparison of costs and benefit. To this scope, recently a software, named Inspection Manager, has been developed by ANTEA and implemented thanks to a cooperation with the University of Padova (Italy). The Inspection Manager provides support in the application of the RBI approach by means of the use of plant-specific data, which are stored in its database; its further implementation, presented in this paper, has made it able to support also cost-benefit analysis and, thus, the selection of measures to be adopted to prevent accidental events causing the release of hazardous materials. A case-study is presented to test the new functionality of the tool; after the identification of the most effective measures, a careful cost-benefit assessment has been executed as a basis for decision-making