24th Process Plant Safety Symposium (PPSS) | AIChE

24th Process Plant Safety Symposium (PPSS)

The Process Plant Safety Symposium (PPSS) is one of five parallel sessions that comprise the Global Congress on Process Safety (GCPS).  The PPSS conference's focus is to provide proven best practices, perspectives, methods, and tools that can be readily practiced and provide value to personnel...

The Process Plant Safety Symposium (PPSS) is one of five parallel sessions that comprise the Global Congress on Process Safety (GCPS).  The PPSS conference's focus is to provide proven best practices, perspectives, methods, and tools that can be readily practiced and provide value to personnel at the plant level.

18th GCPS Conference Program - Draft 

Encouraged topics for this conference include, but are not limited to:

PPSS Chair and Vice Chair

Session Topic Descriptions:

Safeguard Verification

How do you take the results of your HIRA and ensure the safeguards and IPLs are actually in the field and working?  This session will cover practical means of ensuring safeguard functionality and availability in real-time.

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Inherent Safer Design

When designing a new plant or retrofitting an existing plant, how do you effectively evaluate and identify the most inherently safe design?  This session will cover inherently safer design practices that have been proven useful in the field.

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Using technology to Keep Workers Out of the Line of Fire 

The use of drones, robots, and cameras is becoming more popular for hazardous vessel inspection, repair, pipeline inspections, emissions sampling, and confined space entry.  This session will explore the benefits and challenges associated with implementing these higher-tech options.

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Cybersecurity and Process Safety 

As technology continues to be more innovative across our interconnected world, we are finding new ways to address threats and integrate cybersecurity risk management into process safety.  This session is seeking papers related to the intersection of process safety and industrial cybersecurity. In particular, how organizations are addressing the security clauses in the ISA 61511 standard and the technical report ISA-TR84.00.09-2017 as well as best practices in assessment methodologies.

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Applying PSM in Non-Regulated Business

This session will cover examples of developing, implementing, and managing PSM for companies handling hazardous materials that do not fall under 1910.119 and can include concepts such as first recognizing they have a risk challenge to how they maintain a tailored PSM program, perhaps using a "PSM light" approach or tailoring RBPS to lower risk companies, etc.

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PHA Traps

This session will discuss techniques to avoid traps in PHA facilitation and meeting participation such as anchoring, status quo, sunk cost, overconfidence, prudence, confirming evidence, recollection, fatigue, etc.  Facilitators and scribes need to recognize and help the team overcome these traps.

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Identifying Hazards for the Transient Operating State

How do you handle transient operating states in PHAs?  This session will describe practical methods of efficiently and effectively assessing transient operating states.

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Extreme Weather Events and Process Safety 

This session will show how to practically identify, prepare, and recover from natural disaster events.

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Process Safety and Environment, Social, and Governance Criteria

ESG issues are increasingly shaping the way companies do business around the globe.  Criteria around emergency response, process safety metrics, transportation metrics, etc. frequently make their way into ESG reports and dashboards.  This session will discuss the connection between process safety and corporate ESG metrics.

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Augmented/Virtual Reality

This session will explore how augmented reality can support plant operators and maintenance workers to avoid human errors, give engineers the tools for human factor engineering/ergonomic plant design, and help us visualize the interrelations between measurements and safety.

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CCPS Joint Session: Case Histories 

Reviews of process safety incidents provide valuable learning opportunities.  This session invites papers to help understand the causes and lessons learned from incidents in the industry with an emphasis on events that have helped define and develop the process safety field over the years.  

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