The following article from the IEC magazine introduces the first edition of the book:

https://etech.iec.ch/issue/2017-06/improving-safety-and-reliability-in-process-industry-plants

Developing a process safety and reliability program for a process industry plant faces a lot of challenges. This led to the spread of common imperfections and even mistakes in these programs. In addition, the availability of too many engineering, operation and maintenance standards and practices, that were not developed to be aligned, contributed to inconsistency in many programs developed.

This book aims at discussing the elements of process safety and reliability programs for the process industry plants (chemical, petrochemical, oil, gas, power generation, mining and nuclear power plants). Moreover, it aims at discussing the common imperfections and challenges that such programs have in the plants built till nowadays. Furthermore, it aims at recommending better practices to be followed in developing these programs and each element they include. It aims also at providing insights on cost and its balance with safety and reliability specially that at the time of starting this book the oil price dropped significantly, which occurred also more than once over the history of the oil industry.

The book starts with literature review and comparison of several publications, journal articles, international standards as well as engineering practices, previous researches of universities and also making use of forums discussions and conference papers. Several case studies are sourced from practicioners and presented as well.

The book provides critical analysis of the current practices implemented in developing and integrating the elements of process safety & reliability programs showing the advantages, challenges and imperfections as well as the points that need corrections for the sake of both safety and cost savings. The book also includes deducing clear lessons and recommendations to be implemented in a proper process safety & reliability program.

The main conclusions are how to produce an early and integrated development of the program, avoiding mixing up of standards and practices, achieving centralisation in the safety and reliability management, aligning safety and reliability studies like QRA, Hazop, LOPA and RAM analysis and avoiding contradictions between them. The book discusses how to align the different disciplines within a company, how to build the structure of responsibilities for safety and reliability in addition to a lot of technical aspects like what documents could be not useful or even harmful to produce in the design phase of the plant, what to include and exclude from an efficient Hazop, how to properly allocate the necessary safeguards and maintain them.

The main outcome of this book is describing how to produce and maintain an efficient process safety and reliability program that is efficient from the very beginning of a project and throughout the lifecycle of the plant.