ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT STATE OF SAFETY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES: RELEVANT CHALLENGES AND WAYS TO SOLVE THEM

Abstract

The constant convergence of dense buildings and high-risk chemical industry facilities causes an increased risk of human exposure to hazardous accident factors. Risk minimization is one of the main tasks of risk management. Without the use of safety information technologies (SIT), it is virtually impossible to quantify the risk of structurally complex chemical and technological facilities that may contain dozens of hazard sources, each of which may be an apparatus with a difficult to predict behavior: a tank, reactor, separator, etc. Studies demonstrate a gradual shift from steady-state leakage models with a chemical pseudo-component to dynamic modeling of releases with multicomponent mixtures and phase equilibrium. However, do the SITs available on the market correspond to the level of development of the science of industrial safety? A thorough analysis of the publicly available information on commercial and free software products in the field of industrial safety demonstrates a range of unresolved methodological and functional problems that significantly distort estimates of hazardous substances releases, which can lead to both overestimation and underestimation of risk indicators. Such problems as the widespread use of stationary models, replacement of mixtures with psuedo-components, low level of automation and lack of documentation that would substantiate the methodological basis of software products were identified. Based on the analysis, the basic requirements for a state-of-the-art SIT were proposed and the architecture of the ITB element was developed, which allows the use of model chains (automated calculation scheme) and takes into account the ability of models to consider multicomponent mixtures with phase equilibrium at each stage of the emergency depressurization process, which potentially significantly increases the accuracy of the results of the accident consequences forecast and reduces the time of the expert to complete the task.