preHAZOP: Graph‐Based Safety Analysis for Early Integration into Automated Engineering Workflows

The increasing digitalization and standardization within the process industry lead to a high availability of digital, machine‐readable processes and plant descriptions. In particular, the publication of the DEXPI standard provides a digital representation of plant topologies including a complete description of all specifications. In early planning phases, this can be used as the basis for an automated safety assessment since digital availability significantly simplifies accessibility for smart search algorithms. This paper presents the preHAZOP search algorithm, which was developed to analyze P&IDs in DEXPI format and to detect safety‐critical deviations regarding their risk according to a classical HAZOP analysis. The preHAZOP is of particular interest in early process development stages and can be easily integrated into modern, digital engineering workflows. The combination of plant topologies and process information in machine‐readable, graph‐based information models enables good interpretability by algorithms. In this article, an approach is presented that enables automated safety analyses based on graph‐based plant and process models using a deterministic preHAZOP algorithm.