Study on the Development of Design Rationale Management System for Chemical Process Safety

Chemical process design is one of the most important activities in the plant life cycle (PLC). To manage the safety of process plant through the PLC, the system environment to enable recording and accessing design rationale (DR) of the current process and/or plant is indispensable. Theoretical DR information which is discussed on process design activity is very important for safety management activities. However, conventional process risk assessment and safety design mainly depends on engineer's experience, know-how, sense of value etc, and it has not been recorded explicitly and could not be shared for other PLC activities. This paper proposes a DR management model (DR model) for the chemical process design and a simplified DR search system for managing the process design information.