Industry 4.0 for Process Safety: Handbook - Paperback

by Hans Volkmar Schwarz (Author), Jim Petrusich (Author)

The Chemical industry has been using the same decision guidance tools to manage process safety for the last several decades. During this time there has been exponential growth in the amount of data collected at each site. In 1990 the cost of a gigabyte of storage was $100,000; today it is less than 10 cents. The tools available with Industry 4.0 enable us to leverage inexpensive sensors, data, and analytics to make far better decisions on how we allocate resources. This means far better process safety for significantly less money. This requires us to challenge the way we have managed process safety in the past, and develop a culture shift to support the Digital High Reliability Organization.

Author Biography

Jim Petrusich is a Vice President at NWA Software, a company which specializes in real-time analytic monitoring systems in chemical process industries. He has worked on many data aggregation and decision guidance projects with some of the world's largest oil, gas and chemical manufacturers. These deployments have won multiple industry awards including the Manufacturing Intelligence Award (2016, Frost and Sullivan). Prior to joining NWA in 2010, he was Vice President, Sales and Services for Planar Systems, where he was responsible for large deployments of automated monitoring systems (C4I and C5I) in military, surveillance, transportation, and energy projects with many of the world's largest companies and governments. Hans Volkmar Schwartz is Vice President, Process Safety at BASF. He had group wide responsibility for process safety at the world's largest chemical company with more than 100,000 employees in over 80 countries until end of 2016, and, after reorganization, is now supporting BASF's Process Safety approach as an executive expert. Schwarz started his career at BASF in 1986 and progressed through the organization with senior roles in Europe and North America, including plant management, project management, technology director and project director with responsibility for supply chain optimization. His production and technology roles included the development of process safety concepts for some of BASF's most hazardous technologies. Schwarz was given BASF's North American innovation award in 1999.