Abstract
In the chemical process industries, accidents have a high potential and large effects on catastrophic results. Therefore the safety management for accident prevention plays a crucial role to guarantee the process safety. For these reasons, many systematic methods for safety management system have been widely employed in the fields of chemical processes. PSM (Process safety management) is one of most representative methods. The audit system, which is one of PSM system components, evaluates the performance of PMS system. However, most existing safety audit systems are not systematic and these are performed based on knowledges and experiences of various specialist. Moreover, the safety audit is only performed based on each independent technical component. So, the results of safety audit are not a quantitative index but only a series of commentaries. Finally, it is very difficult to obtain the comparison with other plants or industries. In this study, the novel systematic method and index-based accident database of auditing safety management systems for quantitative assessment are proposed. First, the elements of safety audit replace technical methods to categories of accident database. The F-N curve of each category for accident database is employed to derive the index for quantitative assessment. The Accidental Factor Risk Index (AFRI) is suggested for evaluating the effect of each element in accident database and safety audit system. The safety audit can be modified according to the proposed index.