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A domino effect triggered by a natural event (a so-called Natech domino effect) represents a typical high-impact low-probability (HILP) event, which may lead to catastrophic consequences. The presence of safety barriers could have an impact on the effects by impeding propagation patterns and mitigating potential consequences. However, coordinating and maintaining safety measures to establish an effective barrier system against Natech domino effects is complicated. In this paper, the concept of what constitutes a safety barrier and the principles of barrier management are reviewed. Subsequently, the complex phenomenon of Natech domino effects is studied at the individual installation level, while the propagation pattern is explored at the system level. The application of safety barriers is discussed with the aim of coping with potential Natech domino effects. A systematic framework of barrier management is developed to establish and improve the barrier system in the whole cycle (design & construction, operation, accident, recovery & improvement) of a chemical industrial area. The challenges are discussed to highlight future study needs.

Accidents triggered by natural events are becoming an increasing issue for policy-makers and industrial practitioners in the last decades. These events are called Natech (natural hazards triggering technological disasters), and their study is critical due to an increase in both the frequency and the magnitude of the consequences. Considering the possible failure of safety systems and the several equipment items potentially involved in the accidents due to the occurrence of multiple simultaneous failures and cascading events, the emergency response results to be a crucial aspect in the risk assessment and management of Natech events. Despite this, the emergency response can also be affected by the occurrence of natural events. The purpose of the present work is to understand the effects of natural events on emergency response. To reach this goal, some relevant past accidents are studied. The result of the analysis allows highlighting the effects of the natural events on the emergency response. Moreover, lessons learned on the critical elements of the emergency response are derived when considering Natech accidents and related cascading events.

Hazardous events in process plants like the leakage of dangerous substances can result in severe damage, and such an event is often defined as the TOP event of a fault tree analysis (FTA) in a quantitative risk analysis. The TOP event probability can then be calculated if the basic events probabilities are provided. These probabilities are often determined based on generic reliability data which do not necessarily reflect the operational and environmental characteristics of a plant of interest. This paper presents an approach based on Bayesian network (BN) analysis to explicitly include experience data collected during the plant operation to make the generic probabilities more plant specific. The approach is illustrated via a pressure vessel containing a toxic substance in an Ammonia production plant. In this case study, the failure rate distribution in the BN is updated as the new information becomes available during plant operation. The results show that the suggested approach effectively reflects the operating experience of a specific plant.

In 2017, the Journal of Integrated Security Science was founded at the Safety and Security Science section at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Now, in 2021, we are happy to announce that we are rebranding the journal by taking it into an adjusted thematic and theoretical avenue: with a new journal name, a revised scope and updated editorial board, we aim for the journal to become an established value within the field of security and safety science, that guarantees high quality standards. In this editorial, we will elaborate upon the implemented changes, and our goals for the future., Journal of Integrated Security and Safety Science, Vol. 1 No. 1 (2021)

In The Netherlands, there are six large (petro)chemical clusters. Companies in these clusters are located next or close to each other. The policy of the Dutch government is to invest in these clusters, and to stimulate their growth. However, there is little scientific evidence that a cluster of (petro)chemical companies is safer than stand-alone (petro)chemical companies. This research, with an exploratory design, investigates parameters influencing safety of (petro)chemical clusters and stand-alone (petro)chemical companies. Insight into these parameters can lead to targeted initiatives (e.g. by government and companies) to improve safety in both clusters and stand-alone companies. Stimulating cooperation and sharing of knowledge is an important parameter, both in clusters and between clusters, and with non-clustered companies. Information exchange on accident scenarios between adjacent (petro)chemical companies with and without domino-designation requires extra attention. An overarching cluster body can contribute to a more safe, proactive and strategic cooperation. Furthermore, it is important that cluster policies include more than only spatial planning and external safety. Also after the establishment of clusters, companies should not be treated as individual companies, but as companies being part of a cluster, for instance when inspections are performed. Attention is needed for both domino- and escalation-effects, and possible domino-effects with (petro)chemical companies in clusters (just) below the Seveso-threshold. Integrated plants falling under the management of different companies require an adjusted approach to optimise safety.

Gas explosion accidents easily cause severe casualties in Chinese underground coal mines. Systematic analysis of accident causation is crucial for the prevention of gas explosions. This study identifies the representative risk factors of gas explosions and determines the interrelationship among these risk factors to highlight weak links and develop countermeasures. A total of 21 representative risk factors of gas explosions were identified through 128 case studies and front-line investigations. On this basis, a five-level hierarchical structure model of gas explosions was established to explore the complex interrelationships among the representative risk factors based on a combination of the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) methods. Moreover, the Matrix of Cross Impact Multiplications Applied to Classification (MICMAC) method was applied to achieve risk factor classification into four clusters, namely, driving factors, linkage factors, dependent factors and autonomous factors. The results indicated that the interrelationships and emergence properties among the risk factors may cause gas explosions, which should give more attention to the interrelationships among multiple factors and multiple subsystems for coal enterprises. Meanwhile, the complex geological conditions, poor safety supervision, inadequate safety education and training, incomplete execution safety regulations and poor safety technology and input are the long-term focus of risk management for coal enterprises. Finally, 10 countermeasures were proposed to control these representative risk factors and interrelationships. The results are helpful to the development of gas explosion risk management policies and to the preferential allocation of limited resources to resolve these issues.

Stahl has pointed out, responsible innovation is not only a question of the implication and impact of those directly present in an immediate or concrete innovation; it can also be raised as a question of the orientation of society as such - its ‘grand challenges’ such as employment, well-being, growth, societal coherence, development and democracy (Stahl, 2013, p. 2). In this sense the responsibility of responsible innovation can refer to the core well-being of members of society, to the reinforcing or re-casting of the core principles and practices of society and of democracy itself. It can be applied as a tactical approach to counteracting the negative effects of the ‘fragmentation of moral authority’ due to other evolving tendencies that are perceived as threats to society (Appleyard and Stahl, 1995; Davies, Glerup and Horst, 2014). It can also provide a regulatory measure for the governance of private sector actors, to their vulnerabilities to the changing relationship between the market and society (Sholten and van der Duin, 2015). This perspective on responsible innovation links it with the logic of economic growth and the complex link between technological development and the economics of inflation and stagnation (De Saille and Medvecky, 2016, pp. 7-10). Certain segments of the discourse of responsible innovation reformulate the challenges as linked to personal values of individuals in society. Pelle and Reber, for example, take pains to show the relationship between intersubjective value positions and the technological changes that structure society as a whole. They regard responsible innovation as a question of personal responsibility and moral agency. Corporate-level responsibility is in this sense linked to individual responsibility. The concept of responsibility, according to this perspective, can be clarified through the methods of moral philosophy, ‘which defines responsibility as role, task, capacity, authority, virtue, responsiveness, obligation, accountability, blameworthiness, liability’, since the moral sphere of responsibility ‘begins before and goes beyond legal frontiers, ethical concerns frequently arise before new laws have been discussed or enacted’ (2015, p. 113). These processes become socially - but also politically, culturally, morally - more complex when it is security that lies at the heart of the innovation. As several contributors point out, the call for security - securitization - is among the most powerful forces for innovation that we know. It has left a significant mark on the way that innovation is considered, justified and put into practice. Surveillance of society is of course not simply one security measure among many, but rather among the most powerful and consequential of them all. Surveillance innovation is consequentially more contentious than most, often even regarded as being at odds with democratic principles (De Jong, Kupper and Broerse, 2016, p. 27). As becomes clear through the contributions to this volume, for example in chapters by Burgess and van Lieshout and Friedewald, the European Commission regards responsible innovation as key support for an overall agenda of free trade, growth and industrial innovation that aligns with the principles of the European liberal project, which is couched in principles of fairness and rights. Through the channel of the European liberal project, the concept of responsible innovation has found its way into European Commission research and development and the Framework research programmes.

In order to control occupational accidents, it is crucial to have a clear view on the potential accident scenarios that are present in a company. The bow-tie method is a way to capture and visualise these accident processes in an integrative way. Included in the bow-tie are safety barriers (both technical as organisational and human) and management delivery systems that can intervene in these accident processes. Once bow-ties are composed, they are an excellent point of departure to assign indicators to the safety barriers and management delivery systems in order to control (i.e. prevent or mitigate) the accident scenarios. Two types of indicators can be distinguished. Firstly, there are general indicators that are linked to management delivery systems interrupting multiple accident scenarios, and which can yield a higher safety gain (as they intervene in multiple accident scenarios). Secondly, there are scenario-specific indicators targeting one specific accident scenario, and which can be valuable as they target a specific safety problem in the company. Some crucial aspects have to be taken into account when using indicators, such as sequentiality in follow-up and prioritization of indicators, and the focus on quality rather than quantity.

In recent years, many companies stepped up security efforts in chemical and process facilities. The need for the implementation of technological and organizational measures is accompanied by an increased attention for the human factor of the company’s security policy. In order to create a strong security culture, a high level of security awareness among employees is needed. The aim of this paper is to measure the impact of a training session on the level of security awareness. Based on the results of a quantitative research, the effectiveness regarding the security knowledge, attitude and behavior.of employees is measured.

Accident investigations in process industry indicate that inadequate barrier management has been one of the main causes of many major accidents. Barriers degrade over time and at different rates, and these degradations may gradually and unnoticeably drift the system towards a state of high risk. Conventional barrier management approaches apply fixed inspection and maintenance intervals with little direct influence on daily operations to evaluate safety barriers performance. Such issues are addressed by the dynamic barrier management (DBM) concept through the combination of all available information, such as inspection, preventive maintenance, audit, sensors, process control, and near misses or incident records. DBM main goal is to infer barrier status in near real-time and evaluate its impact on risk level. However, the framework for DBM is not detailed and easy to implement and therefore requires further development to clarify the steps. An approach based on system thinking is suggested. Systems engineering (SE) is a suitable approach for managing complex problems by considering the big picture and the SPADE framework from SE is applied to provide a practical roadmap for DBM. Open Access. Published by AIDIC - The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering

Op gebied van veiligheid bestaat al een lange traditie van onderzoek, maar van beveiliging staat dit nog eerder in de kinderschoenen. De aanslagen van 9/11 hebben de aandacht voor beveiliging vergroot. Ook cybercriminaliteit en de bescherming van gevoelige informatie kwam de afgelopen jaren hoger op de bedrijfsagenda te staan. Deze recente focus weerspiegelt zich in het wetenschappelijk onderzoek, waar op het vlak van beveiliging nog maar een beperkt aantal concepten en modellen werden ontwikkeld. De lange onderzoekstraditie op het vlak van veiligheid zorgt voor een vat vol nuttige informatie die aan de basis kan liggen bij het ontwikkelen van nieuwe beveiligingsconcepten en -modellen. In dit artikel worden de verschillen en gelijkenissen tussen veiligheid (safety) en beveiliging (security) besproken, wordt een model voor beveiligingscultuur toegelicht - naar analogie met veiligheidscultuur - en komen enkele praktische tips aan bod om bedrijfsbeveiliging te verhogen.

Why should game theory be introduced and used in the chemical security practitioners? Security risks are initiated by deliberate behaviours for certain goals. For instance, thieves intentionally intrude a plant for stealing valuable materials, or terrorists maliciously set a fire on a chemical facility to cause societal fear. Initiators of security events (henceforth, attackers) would intelligently observe the defender’s defence plan and then schedule their attack accordingly. Powell (2007) illustrated how resources can be mis-allocated if intelligent interactions between the defender and the attacker are not considered. Game theory was invented in the economic domain for modelling both the cooperative and competitive behaviours in a multiple actors system. In the last 100 years, game theory has been theoretically improved and practically applied to various domains, such as the evolutionary biology, the nuclear balance, computer science etc. These researches have demonstrated the capability of game theory in modelling intelligent interactions. Industrial managers need quantitative recommendations to support their decision making. Conventional security risk assessment methodologies (e.g., the API SRA framework (API, 2013)), being good at studying security systematically, are not able to provide quantitative insights. Moreover, results of these conventional methodologies are not repeatable which means that applying the same methodology to the same plant, different analysts may come to different conclusions. Some quantitative security risk assessment models, for instance, by employing a Bayesian Network framework (e.g., Argenti et al. (2018); Landucci et al. (2017); Fakhravar et al. (2017)), can provide quantitative and repeatable results as well. Nevertheless, these models fail on modelling the intelligent interactions between the defender and the attacker. Game theory, conversely, has a rigorous mathematical foundation and models the intelligent interactions. A game theoretic model explicitly indicates 1) who is involved in the game; 2) what actions can each participant take; 3) what results (numbers) will each participant obtain, for each participants’ strategy combination; 4) how much information that each participant has about the game. Furthermore, outputs of a game theoretic model (i.e., equilibrium) clearly and quantitatively indicates what should the participants do (i.e., the equilibrium strategy) and what will each participant obtain (i.e., the equilibrium payoff). A critical issue is that industrial managers often prefer a qualitative approach and they have difficulties on understanding (the physical meaning of) the quantitative outputs of a game theoretical model. This issue can be addressed by requiring game developers to do a further step work by also translating/mapping their quantitative outputs to qualitative descriptions, and the latter should be expressed in terminologies that industrial practitioners are familiar with. Figure 1 illustrates the idea., Journal of Integrated Security Science, Vol 2 No 1 (2018)

A conceptual framework for physical security culture in organisations is proposed, based on the integrative model of safety culture, as developed by Vierendeels et al. (2018). The proposed conceptual framework for physical security culture has the advantage that it brings security threats, technique, organisation and human aspects together in a coherent, integrative and related way. The framework includes five main domains of security culture, being (a) an observable technological domain, (b) an observable organisational domain, (c) an observable human domain, (d) a non-observable organisational domain or perceptual domain, and (e) a non-observable human domain or psychological domain. These five main domains can be further divided into several more specific sub-domains of security culture. At their turn, these sub-domains can be translated into measurable security results, being (a) observable security outcomes, (b) the security climate of an organisation or the shared perceptions on security, and (c) the individual intention to behave secure or insecure. The aim of the framework is to take all security-related aspects into account – based on the specific security threats to which an organisation is exposed – leading to a pro-active approach of the physical security of organisations. The framework provides specific points of departure to make the security culture measurable, and by extension controllable., Journal of Integrated Security Science, Vol 2 No 1 (2018)

This article proposes an ontological and semantic foundation for safety science, based on an etymological and etiological study of the concepts of risk and safety. The awareness regarding the concepts of safety and risk have both evolved in similar ways because of increasingly more demanding situations and events that impact society in an economic way, also linked to the value of human lives. From a purely negative view on risk and safety, this awareness has grown into a more systemic and even holistic perspective on these concepts. The proposed foundation is aligned with the semantics and concepts used in the ISO 31000 risk management standard. Based on this foundation, the article also advocates a theoretical model and a metaphor on how to look at safety and performance in any organization.

Historical data analysis shows that escalation accidents, so-called domino effects, have an important role in disastrous accidents in the chemical and process industries. In this study, an agent-based modeling and simulation approach is proposed to study the propagation of domino effects in the chemical and process industries. Different from the analytical or Monte Carlo simulation approaches, which normally study the domino effect at probabilistic network levels, the agent-based modeling technique explains the domino effects from a bottom-up perspective. In this approach, the installations involved in a domino effect are modeled as agents whereas the interactions among the installations (e.g., by means of heat radiation) are modeled via the basic rules of the agents. Application of the developed model to several case studies demonstrates the ability of the model not only in modeling higher-level domino effects and synergistic effects but also in accounting for temporal dependencies. The model can readily be applied to large-scale complicated cases.

Quantitative risk analysis (QRA) is widely applied in several industries as a tool to improve safety, as part of design, licensing or operational processes. Nevertheless, there is much less academic research on the validity and validation of QRA, despite their importance both for the science of risk analysis and with respect to its practical implication for decision-making and improving system safety. In light of this, this paper presents a review focusing on the validity and validation of QRA in a safety context. Theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions in the scientific literature are reviewed, focusing on three questions. Which theoretical views on validity and validation of QRA can be found? Which features of QRA are useful to validate a particular QRA, and which frameworks are proposed to this effect? What kinds of claims are made about QRA, and what evidence is available for QRA being valid for the stated purposes? A discussion follows the review, focusing on the available evidence for the validity of QRA and the effectiveness of validation methods.

This article studies the effect of different degrees of regulation on competition in the private security industry. An evolutionary law perspective, combined with economic theories of regulation provides a better understanding of the optimal balance between regulation and competition, and encourages policymakers to reflect on the consequences that sector specific rules might have on industry dynamics. In-depth insights result from a case study approach, consisting of the analysis of legal documents and industry data, in addition to interviewing key stakeholders. Based on three country cases (Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany) we report diverse effects of industry regulation. The results hint at a positive relationship between the degree of regulation and industry concentration, meaning that more intense regulation leads to a higher concentration ratio. Regulation clearly acts as an entry barrier and intense regulation weighs more heavily on small newcomers than on large incumbents. From the interviews, welearn that the preferred balance is indeed tilted towards regulation, rather than towards competition, as sector specific rules are the primary tool to ensure high quality private security services.

Historical data analysis shows that escalation accidents, so-called domino effects, have an important role in disastrous accidents in the chemical and process industries. In this study, an agent-based modeling and simulation approach is proposed to study the propagation of domino effects in the chemical and process industries. Different from the analytical or Monte Carlo simulation approaches, which normally study the domino effect at probabilistic network levels, the agent-based modeling technique explains the domino effects from a bottom-up perspective. In this approach, the installations involved in a domino effect are modeled as agents whereas the interactions among the installations (e.g., by means of heat radiation) are modeled via the basic rules of the agents. Application of the developed model to several case studies demonstrates the ability of the model not only in modeling higher-level domino effects and synergistic effects but also in accounting for temporal dependencies. The model can readily be applied to large-scale complicated cases.

Gli impianti di processo sono particolarmente soggetti a gravi e complessi scenari incidentali; pertanto nell’ambito della sicurezza di processo e dell’analisi del rischio riveste un’importanza fondamentale lo sviluppo di analisi economiche Costi-Benefici (Cost-Benefit Analysis), volte all’efficiente selezione ed allocazione delle misure di sicurezza (safety measures). Alcuni eventi recentemente accaduti hanno evidenziato il rischio di incidenti rilevanti dovuto a fattori esterni, come sabotaggi ed attacchi terroristici. Le misure di sicurezza (security measures) possono ridurre significativamente tale rischio, ma ad oggi non esiste una metodologia specifica per l’analisi Costi- Benefici, nel contesto della security per l’industria chimica. Nel presente contributo si intende presentare ed applicare ad un caso di studio un modello dettagliato per l’analisi Costi-Benefici delle misure di sicurezza (security measures), rivolto all’industria chimica e di processo.

The New York City 9/11 terrorist attacks urged people from academia as well as from industry to pay more attention to operational security research. The required focus in this type of research is human intention. Unlike safety-related accidents, security-related accidents have a deliberate nature, and one has to face intelligent adversaries with characteristics that traditional probabilistic risk assessment techniques are not capable of dealing with. In recent years, the mathematical tool of game theory, being capable to handle intelligent players, has been used in a variety of ways in terrorism risk assessment. In this article, we analyze the general intrusion detection system in process plants, and propose a game-theoretical model for security management in such plants. Players in our model are assumed to be rational and they play the game with complete information. Both the pure strategy and the mixed strategy solutions are explored and explained. We illustrate our model by an illustrative case, and find that in our case, no pure strategy but, instead, a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium exists.