Achieving Inherent Safety From Inherent Hazard and Risk Factors

Abstract

Inherent safety is considered the best approach to risk reduction. Academia and industry personnel have studied this topic for a long time. However, many misconceptions and lack of clarity still exist in the industry. Also, there have been many variations in defining the concepts and principles of inherent safety. The paper aims to analyse the concept in a novel way after reviewing past works on the inherent safety concept. The work focuses on the in-depth and systematic identification of hazards for better understanding. It seeks the factors contributing to creating the hazard to propose inherent safety measures. Identifying inherent hazard and risk factors makes it easier for the user to quickly find an inherently safer solution. This approach draws a clear distinction between three risk reduction measures, inherent, passive and active. Inherent safety measures try to reduce the hazard from origin or try to attenuate inherent hazard and risk factors, while passive and active measures only focus on reducing the consequences of accidents or hazardous events. They do not intend to reduce the inherent hazard and risk factor from the system. This paper presents a new definition of inherent safety with a new perspective and identifies the principles used to achieve inherent safety.