Extending Safety Control Structures: A Knowledge Graph for STAMP

The increasing interactions among technical components and human agents in modern industrial systems poses new challenges for safety management, demanding for novel approaches to extend techno-centric investigations with social-oriented analyses. In these scenarios, it becomes crucial the usage of a detailed accident analysis beyond immediate failures, to encompass physical, cyber and social aspects. The Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP) was developed as an accident model that makes use of systems theory to arrange a causality model focusing on system hazards. The inner nature of a STAMP model, which maps connections (feedbacks and control actions) among system elements, matches the principles of a graph representation, which are made up of vertices and edges mapping connections. This correspondence may then enable the exploitation of a STAMP-driven graph to guide safety assessments by systematic graph analyses. This paper explores the possibility of deriving a knowledge graph from a STAMP safety control structure and use it as a key element for subsequent hazard analyses. The study is instantiated on case study related to the inspection (based upon Seveso III directive) of a Seveso establishment. The analysis is meant to highlight the safety requirements to adapt the inspection procedure to possible future changes, as promoted by an energy transition. The preliminary results show the potential of such tools to empower - or possibly update - modern Safety Management System.

Keywords: Knowledge management, Inspection management, Systems theory, Risk management, Industrial plants.

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