The evolving industrial process safety world

Process safety insights

• Modernizing legacy safety systems with AI and AR/VR is crucial for preventing catastrophic failures in complex industrial operations, enhancing safety and operational efficiency.
• Cybersecurity threats increase as process safety systems integrate more technology. Facilities must adopt robust frameworks, like IEC 62443, to mitigate these evolving risks effectively.
• AI and AR/VR offer transformative training and maintenance capabilities, helping facilities bridge the skills gap, reduce human error and prepare for real-world process safety challenges.

Process safety is a vital part of operations, especially in volatile industries such as oil and gas, life sciences, power generation and chemical. All provide essential goods and services for global consumption; a disruption could have an adverse impact on the global supply chain. Process safety is risk-averse, and rightly so as massive consequences are associated with a safety-related incident due to a process failure.

Risk increases as industrial operations become larger and more complex. For many facilities, downtime is simply not an option. In the event of an incident, it would be nice if a superhero were on call to take control and mitigate risk. In the real world, though, a combination of people, safety systems and automation must save the day.

As the industrial landscape evolves and changes, so do the underlying technologies and risk profiles. Facilities must digitally transform or modernize their legacy process safety systems to keep people, operations and the surrounding environment safe.

Modernizing these safety systems and leveraging new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) can help personnel design, build, operate and maintain better, safer and more secure systems and applications.

Traditional layers of process safety protection

Process safety systems, such as basic process control systems (BPCS) and safety instrumented systems (SIS), are passive or low-demand systems with layers of protection built in to help keep workers safe in hazardous environments. These systems reduce and mitigate risk to help protect people, processes and the environment. They bring a process to a safe state, whether that involves shutting something down or activating something.

People, technology and operations can impact all BPCS and SIS levels of protection. To keep operations safe, these systems must always be available and operating efficiently. Workers tend to consider them secure due to being air-gapped, meaning the systems are isolated unless a worker manually accesses them.

Process safety systems are designed to reduce and mitigate risk to help protect people, processes and the environment. Courtesy: Rockwell Automation

By monitoring alarms on a human-machine interface (HMI), plant operators are one of the layers of protection for any safety system or security model. Maintaining safety systems requires oversight. Workers must document, test, document again, validate and document results. This process quickly becomes monotonous, prone to human error and forgotten or skipped in extreme scenarios.

For these reasons, process safety systems are seldom engaged and rarely modified unless they require some regulatory compliance. A BPCS regularly executes, so if the system is not operating effectively, it is noticed. If the BPCS is not operating at full capacity due to lack of maintenance, resource bandwidth or another reason and the operator doesn’t address an alarm quickly enough, then the SIS takes over to monitor and maintain process safety.

Considering these issues, process safety systems tend to lag in having updates or new technological advancements applied to them. These older systems must catch up with the modern world. Otherwise, the potential for a catastrophic event is imminent, especially as the industrial automation control system (IACS) community faces cybersecurity threats and attacks.

Safeguarding process facilities against cyberattacks

The Fourth Industrial Revolution promised a boost in productivity due to increased diagnostics, additional connectivity between devices, and a convergence of information technology and operational technology (IT/OT) systems. Even with all of that, cybersecurity concerns loomed in the background.

All the process safety benefits amplify efficiency, but also drastically increase a system’s attack surface. Each additional external connection made to a system is another potential attack vector for a vulnerability to be exploited.

Process safety systems are a part of most control systems in a facility, which means IT/OT connectivity can no longer rely solely on existing solutions for security. In this fast-moving world, if facilities don’t have the proper framework or resource expertise, keeping these systems secure is challenging.

Fortunately, industry standards provide the required guidance. Many in the IACS community have quickly adopted the IEC 62443 standard for risk analysis and security best practices.

Updating legacy systems can often be a costly endeavor, but doing nothing and becoming the target of a cyberattack can be much more costly. An attack leads to days or even weeks of unplanned downtime, lost revenue, legal issues, and a major blow to the company’s reputation. In recent years, these types of attacks have increased continuously.

The time to digitally transform and update these legacy safety systems with security in mind is now. Facility personnel can apply AI, AR/VR and other technologies to help make systems safer and secure. The process starts with a combination of people and technology.

Navigating in an intelligent, virtual world

With attrition and retirement on the rise, facilities face a skills gap. New resources need training and must get up to speed as soon as possible on the various systems, especially when expert legacy system knowledge is no longer available. Being able to simulate or emulate process applications is key for training purposes.

Many facilities are already relying on simulation tools like AI and AR/VR to practice BPCS and SIS operation and maintenance scenarios without putting the real equipment, people or environment at risk. This is not a highly graphical representation of the process, nor is it the same as being on-site seeing and interacting with the real equipment.

However, unlike people, these intelligent tools do not have to take breaks to eat or sleep. For instance, it’s possible to depict a plant virtually and navigate its virtual world with a VR headset. Facilities also can use AI to monitor process variables and make sure they remain within the defined safety tolerances. In these instances, training is much more beneficial and efficient working in a safe environment than learning by reacting to incidents in real time.

AR/VR also can help ramp up employee learning on SIS in various capacities. The technology can emulate basic maintenance and testing functions and walk a user through real-life workflows. What used to take months can now be learned in days/weeks. In addition to replacing existing functionality, AR/VR also can dramatically expand capabilities to perform scenario planning for scheduled shutdowns as well as catastrophic failure events. These events have historically only been able to be learned through experiencing them live, not an ideal scenario.

In the not-too-distant future, safety personnel can leverage AI to design the safety requirement specification (SRS) and perform all safety calculations or even create the application code itself. With access to live industry data, AI can incorporate the latest industry best practices and update aspects of the SIS as deficiencies are realized. Once a safety team validates the SRS, AI can be further leveraged to operate and maintain the maintenance and testing schedule to make sure safety calculations remain valid over time.

The Apple Vision Pro is an example of modern technology capable of integrating AI and AR to help personnel react better to high-pressure situations better while providing them with more information.

When navigating a plant in this virtual world, for example, maintenance personnel are informed of areas that have process warnings or alarms. It also alerts them to maintenance or replacement issues as equipment reaches end of life. This technology uses AR and AI to help personnel work better and smarter.

These technologies provide many untapped opportunities to improve the safety and reliability of a SIS. The monotony of the SIS could be offloaded to these technologies and enable people to solve the types of problems only humans can.

Staying ahead of the curve with process safety

Process safety must always be a priority in any facility. Modernizing legacy safety systems and following industry standards and best practices will help improve operations and reduce catastrophic failures. The main goal for all process safety systems is to make sure they operate efficiently to keep the plant, its people and the surrounding community safe.

Even though the full capabilities of AI are still developing, and AR/VR is a relatively resource-intense mechanism, preparing now for their adoption will put facilities ahead of the curve. This foresight will allow process safety systems to make work environments safer and more robust now and into the future.

Brian Widman and Stefan Mizera are global product managers for Rockwell Automation. Edited by Chris Vavra, senior editor, Control Engineering, WTWH Media, cvavra@wtwhmedia.com.

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