Managing Industrial Safety through a Cost-Benefit Approach: a Case Study

The safety management of chemical and petrochemical installations is a complex issue. Plant managers have continuously to search for innovative solutions dealing with the prevention of failures and losses of containment from process equipment. To this scope a great support is given by popular standards, i.e. API Risk Based Inspection (RBI) that permits a significant reduction of maintenance costs and, at the same time, the increase of plant's reliability and availability. To support these activities, a software, named Inspection Manager, has been developed in these last year; it allows defining inspection and maintenance programs as it takes advantage from plant-specific data stored in the database. The use of this tool permits a significantly reduction of maintenance costs and, simultaneously, the increase of plant's reliability and availability. Given that, in the context of chemical industry, a proper selection of measures is needed to increase the level of industrial safety and that the adoption of such measures poses costs, a more recent version of Inspection Manager has been integrated by a tool supporting cost-benefit analyses. This paper presents a case-study, which allows a further testing of the functionality of the Inspection Manager tool by using a more complex context compared to the past applications. The case-study is an absorption unit of a refinery, after the identification of the most effective measures, a careful cost-benefit assessment has been executed as a basis for decision-making.