Hazard identification in process plant through CAD, CAE and PDM systems

The main difficulties in applying HAZOP-like techniques may be found in high costs and time required for its development. The attempts of creating software tools for automatically applying HAZOP didn't give the expected results, not only because of the needs of interacting with specialists but also because of the big amount of information to handle. Typically a plant design is composed by an huge number of CAD documents of many different types such as layout, P&ID, Piping, Mechanical, Structures etc. Such documents are linked each other by complicated relationships. The objective of the research presented in this paper is to define and implement software tools that allow an easy and fast navigation throughout the plant design database in order to promptly identify those design data, which are meaningful for hazard identification, and providing, when possible, automatic verification of safety criteria.