Process Safety: A New Approach using AutoCAD® P&ID as the Data Link

Intelligent P&IDs do more than just improve drawing productivity. When linked to a central database, the P&ID can give access to information that makes both regulatory compliance and safety management easier. AutoCAD® P&ID improves P&ID drafting productivity and provides a link to safety databases providing a new approach to safety management in process facilities.

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Safety is Number One You see the signs everywhere, “Safety is Number One”. The focus is on personnel safety at the work site and reducing accidents and while some dangerous incidents are caused by unavoidable, random events, many more are down to not having access to the right information at the right time – or because of poor communications. With growing globalization and sub-contractors spanning different companies and disciplines, misunderstandings are almost inevitable. It’s time to rethink the way process safety information is created, stored and shared.

No-one denies that process safety information is generated, reviewed and stored during the design, construction and operations of process plant and that safety reviews are an important part of lifecycle of process facilities today. But is the safety information readily available and easily accessible when needed? Or more importantly, before it is needed?

This whitepaper expands on this subject and describes a novel approach to integrated safety analysis and information management which can be a basis to help meet the demand for a comprehensive integrated process safety management system as recommended by the Baker Reporti back in 2007. With a process plant safety information repository, both archival and most-up-to-date information can be easily accessed to help deal with the problem at hand.

Managing Safety Information Today Today’s process safety assessment workflow has evolved from the introduction of Hazop Studies in the 1970s as a series of manual assessment steps, generally not joined-up and carried out with few IT aids other than single-user standalone software tools. Few aids have emerged for managing the safety information and attention has been focussed on making good safety decisions through human thinking and judgement, rather than capturing and distributing the decisions and information generated by the safety engineers. The output from this type of workflow is typically a set of separate documents in different formats, recorded on paper or in simple computer files.

The safety information is difficult to keep up-to-date with plant changes and its information can degrade or be lost over time. The information recording the decisions may not be easily understood by plant or maintenance staff, and it is difficult to summarise for higher management reporting. There is no single location for key safety information and no single inventory of risks and safeguards. And all this safety information needs to be transferred to the Facility as part of the plant documentation.

This results in safety-critical information being held in different formats and files. For example, it may be part of a company manual or included in hazard and risk assessment reports, operating procedures or in a training manual. This disparate document-based approach creates islands of information and requires duplicate data entry into multiple systems, giving greater scope for human error. Vital data needed by operators may not be available at the right time and in the right form when fast decisions are required.

A New Approach If all process safety information were to be kept in a single, centralized repository which is easily accessible from any location within any organization and by any authorized

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personnel, much of the confusion could be eliminated. This need for common understanding and a single source of information is currently driving the development of hazardous operations (hazop) software into the P&ID environment. Every decision maker has access to P&IDs – and today’s intelligent P&IDs can hold and point to a great deal of data.

This integration creates a layer of information combining P&IDs with other hazard, risk and safety information from across an entire enterprise in a multi-user, web-enabled database. This gives access with search functions to any authorized employee any time and can also provide safety audits and reports for management and regulators. The result is a centralized database of safety information easily and directly accessible from an intelligent P&ID.

Intelligent P&IDs are not new. In fact many engineering firms use intelligent P&IDs as part of the design process, using the intelligence to transfer line information into 3D modeling, to closer integrate the detail design process with the conceptual and process design process and to eliminate data inconsistencies between the P&IDs and 3D design model. However, the value of the intelligent P&ID has not been fully appreciated in the environment of the operating facility. In the past, maintaining intelligent P&IDs has required a higher level of software implementation, understanding and training that translates into higher costs. Recently however, intelligent P&IDs have been brought into the currently familiar AutoCAD® drafting world, allowing the benefit of intelligence to the current AutoCAD-based P&IDs without incurring expensive re-tooling and re-training. In fact a number of facilities are now testing the use of AutoCAD® P&ID software linked to engineering and compliance systems to help streamline compliance reporting.

Hazard studies

Safety Case and Client deliverable

Control

Action

Management

MoC Global

Engineering Integrated Workflow

Safety Information

Design Information Process Data Streams Phys Properties PID Control Data Plant Item Specs etc …………

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AutoCAD® P&ID – a new role

The AutoCAD P&ID software is an AutoCAD-based application that includes a collection of P&ID-specific productivity tools to help automate and simplify many of the drafting, design and editing tasks that are performed every day. These productivity tools help simplify the maintenance of the very important P&ID drawings, but at the same time create a database that contains much of the information that is implied from the drawing. Keeping the database and the drawings in sync is managed by the software in a work process that all designers who are used to using AutoCAD are very comfortable with. Data input to the database is through standard tag placement. For example, pipeline connections are implied from the connections made during line placement and the size, spec and insulation information comes directly from the line number tag as it is placed. Piping components automatically derive this information from the line. Plus when the symbols are being placed, the symbols automatically orientated themselves to align with the piping. From-to information derived from the drafting also ensures that flow-dependent components automatically place correctly.

User access to the database is through the Data Manager which provides a spreadsheet-like interface to the data allowing easy editing of the data. An export/import facility allows the data to be exported to Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheets for editing by other users.

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The database is a standard SQL-based database system, giving the ability to link the P&ID database to other databases, thus forming the P&ID interface to safety and compliance data.

Next Steps Hazid, a UK-based company that specializes in software for the safety of industrial systems, has become part of the Autodesk Developer Network to connect its developments in process safety to Autodesk’s intelligent P&ID software, AutoCAD P&ID. Hazid is developing an integrated process safety management system that systematically and continuously identifies, reduces and manages process safety risks.

Hazid’s 3-step safety approach linking AutoCAD P&ID to its safety systems allows safety rules to be checked early in the design process. First, safety rules are validated against the P&ID. P&IDs are checked for best practices to reduce time spent in safety study meetings. The rules that are applied are in the form of safety checklists to check that the correct safety equipment is present and that the design parameters of the safety equipment enable the equipment to function as desired. SAFE (Safety Analysis and Functional Evaluation) rules check the safety devices to make sure that they carry out the correct action on the correct item in the event of an emergency .Cause and Effect Tables are produced from these rules.

Safety Rule Violation Detected

Design checks showing details of a failed check

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In the second step, the Hazop process and results are stored in a central database, linked directly to the P&ID. This allows the Hazop process to be started earlier as changes in the P&ID do not require a full run of the Hazop Process, only those parts of the process affected by the changes in the P&ID need to be re-evaluated. And since the results are stored, they are easily searchable and available during the operations phase of the plant. Finally, the Management Of Change process keeps track of changes and provides an auditable process to be applied during the change process in P&IDs and associated data.

The end result is a safety database that is not just a series of documents created during safety reviews, but the results of the safety checks applied throughout the process. As a result, engineers can not only review the safety rules, but also the process by which the specific safety checks were applied, giving more depth into understanding the safety philosophy applied. This addresses the often asked “Why did they do this?” question.

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i Baker III, J.A., Bowman, F.L., Erwin, G., Gorton, S., Hendershot, D., Leveson, N., Priest, S., Rosenthal, I. Tebo, P.V., Wiegmann, D.A. & Wilson, L.D. (2007), The Report of the BP U.S. Refineries Independent Safety Review Panel