Overview

Towards the enhancement and improvement of process systems engineering, recent research interests have been focusing on automating different areas within the plant lifecycle. One important area within plant enterprise is enterprise safety. Considerable research efforts are focused on the design and development of practical approaches and successful computer-aided tools and systems that cover different safety functions and activities within plant lifecycle. Although these components could automate and enhance specific safety functions or aspects, however the integration among these components and the complete view is still far beyond expectations. This is simply because most of the developed solutions either focusing on the process safety aspects in the micro level or enterprise risks in the macro level. The integration between these two levels is still unclear and is under investigation. From the system side, most of the proposed automated engineering solutions are more directed towards the management of safety activities within the different functional areas such as design, operation, and maintenance. It is essential to establish integration between the automated engineering modules from the design stage, operational systems, as well as other components within plant enterprise such as human resource, financial and services.