Production and evaluation of safety assurance software for process industrial sites in New Zealand

With a rapidly changing environment of industrial safety legislation in New Zealand, all of the country's process industries will be required to appraise the hazards on their sites by 1993. Currently, overseas techniques are available, but their complexity, expense and data requirements make them inappropriate for most New Zealand industry. In this project, a methodology for hazard appraisal was designed to analyse and quantify hazards on process sites. The methodology was then encoded into software for ease of application. To be useful for the wide range of New Zealand industry, the software had to be easy to use, able to run using a minimum of crude data and able to run on inexpensive hardware. The software was produced and found to give valid results from the crude data used. When its results were compared to those from an analysis using an internationally recognised method, they were found to be within the limits of expectation, considering the fundamental differences in approach. While the internationally accepted method was seen to be more reliable, the project method was found to give realistic rankings, that would be useful to a wide range of New Zealand Industry. The method of rapid ranking used would highlight potentially hazardous areas on a site and help raise the awareness of industrial hazards in the users of the method. There were several modifications specified, whose application to the project software would improve the quality of results