Analysis of root causes for chemical accidents basis on business process model for plant maintenance

Unintended release of material from chemical plants becomes a serious problem that may lead to a fire, explosion or human health incident. Plant maintenance is concerned, the direct cause of the unintended release can be clarified, e.g. strength decline by chemical and/or physical deterioration, imperfectness of isolation at overhaul operation, and so on. Such a direct cause of incident is brought about by a failure in any business process or failures in several business processes that constitute plant maintenance activity. To clarify these root causes for an incident, the business processes should be defined definitely, and failure is to be analyzed on the basis of that definition. However, business process of plant maintenance is managed experimentally in general, so that it was difficult to specify root causes for unintended release so far. The authors have developed a generic business process model for plant maintenance as IDEF0 (Integration DEFinition for function model) activity model. In this study, business process model based root causes analysis of incidents in plant maintenance is proposed, and an incident case is applied to illustrate effectiveness of this approach.