Available online at www.sciencedirect.
com
ScienceDirect
A review of safety indices for process design
Nitin Roy1,3, Fadwa Eljack2, Arturo Jiménez-Gutiérrez4,
Bin Zhang1,3, Preetha Thiruvenkataswamy1,
Mahmoud El-Halwagi1 and M Sam Mannan1,3
Several indices have been developed as a measure of safety for
different pieces of equipment, use of chemicals and operating
conditions in transformation processes. Current efforts are
being observed on the application of such types of metrics as
part of the design of a process. This application focuses on the
synthesis of inherently safer designs. It is then important to
recognize proper safety metrics that can be applied from the
early design stage of a chemical process. In this paper a review
on the development of safety indices, with particular emphasis
on their application for process design, is presented. The type
of information and the output one obtains from the application
of such indices is described. Some examples of recent
applications that include safety as part of the design of several
chemical processes are given.
Addresses
1
Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, Texas A&M
University System, College Station, TX 77843-3122, USA
2
Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, Qatar
University, Doha, Qatar
3
Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center, Texas A&M University
System, College Station, TX 77843-3122, USA
4
Departamento de Ingenierı́a Quı́mica, Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya,
Celaya, Gto. 38010, Mexico
Corresponding author: Mannan, M Sam (mannan@tamu.edu)
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2016, 14:42–48
This review comes from a themed issue on Process systems
engineering
Edited by Mahmoud El-Halwagi and Ka Ming Ng
For a complete overview see the Issue and the Editorial
Available online 8th August 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.coche.2016.07.001
2211-3398/# 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The assessment of safety properties in process design has
been recognized as one of the major topics under current
research. A design project, driven by a market analysis,
gets into different stages going from research and devel-
opment to the production of the valuable chemical.
Different safety metrics that could be applied from the
conceptual stage of a process design are needed. Typi-
cally, major decisions are based on technical, economic,
and more recently environmental considerations; and
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2016, 14:42–48
aspects such as safety issues are left for analysis until
the project is completed. As part of the safety analysis,
critical points in the plant are located, and control loops
are designed to prevent major damages in the event of
plant accidents. The application of safety metrics from
the early stages of a design project would guide the efforts
toward an inherently safer design. In this paper we give a
review on available safety indices that have been devel-
oped, with particular interest to those that can be applied
during the design of a chemical or biochemical process,
and include some analysis as to their use and the type of
information needed for their application.
Development of safety indices
The most conventional and popular approach to qualita-
tively evaluate the hazards of a system is the Hazard and
Operability method (HAZOP). However, HAZOP can
only be implemented after the detailed design of the
plant is available, and requires significant amount of time
and effort. As far as the quantification of risk in a proces-
sing plant, a convenient approach is the application of a
quantitative risk analysis (QRA), a method based on a
probabilistic estimation of failures and consequences in
different pieces of equipment [1]. The above methods
require the details of the plant or design to be available.
The estimation of safety based on initial data such as
chemicals, synthesis routes, operating conditions and
equipment, for the process would give the designer a
useful basis for the assessment of risk and safety, which
would complement other design tasks such as equipment
sizing, selection of operating conditions and their effect
on the process economics. Different process designs,
chemistry routes or selection of chemicals could be rated
for their safety properties. Based on the need for tools for
early evaluation of safety, several hazard and risk indices
have been developed. We describe here the major devel-
opments in this area.
Safety indices have several degrees of details regarding
the input required for their use, which means that differ-
ent indices would be suitable for application depending
on the state of development of the design of a process.
The development of safety indices should take into
account the factors of the processing plant, including
transportation, that affect the hazard of the system.
The first safety index reported in the literature was
developed by Dow in 1964 [2], known as the Dow Fire
& Explosion Index (F&EI); the index is based on the
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material properties and process conditions. The index
was subjected to several revisions [3,4]. The Dow’s
chemical and exposure index (C&EI) was the basis for
the development of the Mond index by Lewis [5], which
included the toxicity of the chemical. A parallel develop-
ment was the Dow Chemical & Exposure Index [6],
which took into account the toxic exposure from chemi-
cals. Both Dow F&EI and Dow C&EI have found ample
use in the chemical industry.
Khan and Abbasi [7] developed the Hazard Identification
and Ranking (HIRA), an index to overcome some of the
limitations of the Dow Fire & Explosion Index, since in
the Dow’s index the material factor is considered as
independent of the operating conditions and it depends
more on expert opinion than on the system properties.
The HIRA index took chemical thermodynamic proper-
ties into account, and integrated it with expert opinions.
The index provides a risk ranking of the process units in
terms of a damage radius in case of an accident. The types
of outputs of the Dow F&EI and the HIRA indices are
quite similar. The Accident Hazard Index [8], which was
developed a year earlier, had similar characteristics to the
HIRA. The structure of HIRA has been subjected to
several revisions, for instance the one developed by Khan
et al. [9], who added a credit factor for safety barriers
(including those related to preparation for emergencies),
procedures, and safety instrumented systems (SIS). Its
application requires a detailed design of the process, or
the plant to be in operation.
The structure of the HIRA index has had additional
impact on the development of other indices, such as
the I2SI index [10], which also gives a cost component
for the damage of the infrastructure and humans similar to
the Dow F&EI index. The HIRA index was also used as a
sub-index for the Domino Hazard Index [11] to calculate
the hazard of a secondary unit if it is affected by a primary
unit. This index gives a domino hazard ranking of a given
unit in the plant based on the consequences under some
set of scenarios, on the distance between units and on the
chemical and process properties associated to the units.
The index is particularly useful as a tool for plan layout
decision-making.
One recent application of the HIRA index was in the
development of the Quantitative Integrated Inherent
Safety Design index [12], which includes a quantitative
inherent safety measure and gives a framework to develop
alternative process flowsheets and process flow routings. A
similar approach was used for the development of the
Inherent Safety and Key Performance Indicators (IS-KPIs)
by Tugnoli et al. [13]. This index gives emphasis to both the
catastrophic and maximum credible scenarios for a unit. It
also takes into account the credits for various types of
equipment based on its failure rates. The index can only
be used after the detailed design of the process is known.
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A review of safety indices for process design Roy et al. 43
An item of particular interest in recent years has been
related to the application of inherent safety, the term first
coined by Trevor Kletz [1]. An index for inherent safety
was first developed by Heikkila [14], who labeled it as
Inherent Safety Index (ISI). This index was partially
based on the PIIS index of Edward and Lawrence [15].
This index aims to quantify or score the factors that define
the principles of inherent safety, namely minimization,
moderation, substitution and simplification. This was
further enhanced into the Enhanced Inherent Safety
Index, EISI [15] and the Comprehensive Inherent Safety
Index [17]. The concept of the Inherent Safety Index has
been taken as a basis to develop new indices [18,19].
Another type of approach was provided by the develop-
ment of fuzzy indices, which account for uncertainties in
the hazard and risk calculations. As part of this approach, a
fuzzy member function is given to each of the sub-indices
of a fuzzy index. A pioneer work in this area was the one
by Gentile et al. [20] who developed the Fuzzy Inherent
Safety Index and paved the way for other fuzzy-based
indices. The Fuzzy ISI index addresses the inherent
uncertainty in the hazard calculations. It converts linguis-
tic variables into fuzzy ranking of the chemical for each
type of hazard. Chemical properties and plant layout are
some of the factors taken into account by this index.
A useful set of indices has been developed that allows
their applications as part of automated procedures. Some
methodologies have been used to automate hazard and
risk calculations through the link to external software
such as process simulators. Within this development we
can cite the Process Route Index (PRI) [21] and the
Process Stream Index (PSI) [22], which estimate hazard
depending on synthesis routes and uses streams instead of
units to simplify the calculations. A predictive risk index
shown by Chen and Yang [23] uses a predictor based on
regular observations of unsafe conditions as an indicator
of safety of a processing plant.
Several of the indices that have been developed have
focused on material properties [24–26]. These indices can
be used in the research phase of a process design or early
stages of flowsheet design. Indices such as the Environ-
mental Health and Safety (EHS) [24] and the Runaway
Reaction Index [25] use only information on material and
reaction route properties to assess a given chemical and
provide a ranking of alternatives. The EHS index takes
into account safety, health and environmental hazard
related the chemical. It can be used to rank chemicals
and reaction routes at the research level or at the early
conceptual design of the process. Other indices such as
HIRA, ISI and Dow F&EI also have the chemical/mate-
rial factor embedded either implicitly or explicitly.
Another set of indices worth of mention is related to life-
cycle [27–30]; such indices quantify the risk and hazards
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2016, 14:42–48
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2016, 14:42–48

44 Process systems engineering

Table 1

A list of 25 representative safety indices, their level of application and inputs required

Level of application Feasibility SDY Conceptual engineering (Pre- FEED Detailed design Operations Output type
FEED)
Safety indices/inputs Chemical Reaction Operating Equipment PFD Inventory Equipment Process P&ID Plant layout Safety Emergency Human
required properties route conditions design controls systems & procedures factors
properties barriers
Mond Index [5] 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Numerical ranking
Edward and 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Numerical ranking
Lawrence PIIS
[14]
Dow C&EI [6] 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 Damage radii, Cost
involved
Dow F&EI [3] 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 Hazard radii,
Numerical ranking
Hazard identification 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 Hazard radii,
and ranking (HIRA) Numerical ranking
[7]
Inherent Safety Index 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Numerical ranking
[14]
EHS Index [24] 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Numerical ranking
INSET Toolkit [37] 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 Qualitative ranking,
Numerical ranking
SweHI [9] 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 Hazard radii,
Numerical ranking
GreenPro - I: [38] 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Fuzzy ranking
Runaway Risk Index 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 Runaway risk rank
[39]
Fuzzy Logic Based 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 Fuzzy ranking
ISI [20]
I2SI [10] 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 Fuzzy ranking,
Numerical ranking
Life Cycle Index [27] 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Numerical ranking
PROCESO index [40] 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Numerical ranking
KPIs Quantitative 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 Estimated risk
Assessment [13]
Domino Hazard Index 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 Numerical ranking
[11]
Environmental 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 Numerical ranking
Consequence
Index [41]
Process Route Index 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Numerical ranking
www.sciencedirect.com

[21]
Qualitative 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 Inherently safer
Assessment for alternatives
Inherently Safer
Design (QAISD) [42]
Risk Assessment 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 Numerical ranking
Hydrogen [28]
 A review of safety indices for process design Roy et al. 45

due to various parts of the product life-cycle such as

Runaway risk rank

processing, storage and transportation and their effect

Numerical ranking

Numerical ranking
Output type

to society and the environment. For example, the Life

Damage radii,
Cycle (LinX) [27] and the Risk Assessment Hydrogen

Risk rank
indices [28] cover several parts of the product life cycle.
The LinX index assesses various properties of the life
cycle of a technology such as environment, health and
Emergency Human
systems & procedures factors

safety, as well as technological costs and socio-political

0

0
aspects. The parameters have been grouped intuitively
Operations

into sub-indices, and a weighted average is used to give a

single ranking. However, the ranking is based solely on
expert opinion. The path forward in index development
0

aims at giving rankings at multi-scale levels of the system.

For example, it would be useful to include ranking of
chemicals, units in process plants, storage and cover a
barriers
Safety

supply chain and its effect on the environment. Several

Detailed design

indices have also been developed specifically for trans-

portation [31–35]. To take into account the waste disposal
Reaction Operating Equipment PFD Inventory Equipment Process P&ID Plant layout

of the chemicals and its related safety Musee et al. devel-

0

oped the fuzzy hazardous waste index [36].

From the several safety indices that have been reported in

0

the literature, Table 1 shows a selection of representative

indices that can be applied at different stages of process
controls

design and the type of output obtained from their appli-

0

cation. Table 2 gives additional information for the ap-

plication of the selected safety indices. Such indices
design

might be considered as primary sources for their use in

FEED

studies regarding the safety assessment of process design

at different stages of development.

The interest in safety indices as related to several stages

1

and parts of design and life-cycle analysis is reflected in

Figure 1. The keywords used were process safety index,
Conceptual engineering (Pre-

life cycle safety index, transportation safety index and so

on. The total literatures found relevant were 2762. And it
was retrieved on February 17th, 2016. One can notice that
0

0
FEED)

the highest degree of application has been centered on the

process itself, which calls for the development of suitable
indices to be applied during the design stage of the process.
conditions

Some applications of safety during the

process design
properties

Recent applications of safety principles and metrics as

route
Feasibility SDY

part of the design of a process illustrate the importance

and interest that this topic is gaining in the research
community. Some works have used inherent safety prin-
properties
Chemical

ciples, while others have implemented simple safety

1

measures that add to the economic metrics as part of

the design problem formulation. Patel et al. [44] applied
Thermal Chemicals
Table 1 (Continued )

Safety indices/inputs

the concepts of inherent safety for the design of liquid–

Risk Based Ranking
Level of application

Occupational Risk

liquid extraction processes. Medina et al. [45] showed how

Process Stream

of Hazardous

distillation systems can be designed using inherently

Index [22]

Index [43]
QI2SD [12]

safer principles. An application of Quantitative Risk

required

Analysis metrics together with process economics was

[25]

used by Medina-Herrera et al. [46] to identify optimal

solutions in the form of Pareto fronts for the selection of

www.sciencedirect.com Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2016, 14:42–48

46 Process systems engineering

Table 2

Additional properties for the selection of 25 indices

Process plant Storage Transportation Toxicity Fire

Mond Index [5] 1 0 0 1 1
Edward and Lawrence PIIS [14] 1 0 0 1 1
Dow C&EI [6] 1 1 0 0 1
Dow F&EI [3] 1 1 0 1 0
Hazard Identification and Ranking (HIRA) [7] 1 1 1 1 1
Inherent Safety Index [14] 1 1 0 1 1
EHS Index [24] 1 0 0 1 1
INSET Toolkit [37] 1 1 1 1 1
SweHI [9] 1 1 1 1 1
GreenPro - I: [38] 1 1 1 1 1
Runaway Risk Index [39] 1 0 0 0 0
Fuzzy Logic Based ISI [20] 1 1 0 1 1
I2SI [10] 1 1 1 1 1
Life cycle index [27] 1 0 1 0 0
PROCESO index [40] 1 1 1 1 1
KPIs Quantitative Assessment [13] 1 1 0 1 1
Domino Hazard Index [11] 1 0 0 1 1
Environmental Consequence Index [41] 1 1 1 1 1
Process Route Index [21] 1 0 0 0 1
Qualitative Assessment for Inherently Safer Design (QAISD) [42] 1 0 0 1 1
Risk Assessment Hydrogen [28] 1 1 1 1 1
Process Stream Index [22] 1 0 0 0 1
QI2SD [12] 1 1 1 1 1
Occupational Risk Index [43] 1 0 0 0 0
Risk Based Ranking of Hazardous Thermal Chemicals [25] 1 0 0 0 0

solvents for extractive distillation processes. Hamad et al.
[47] incorporated safety metrics for the assessment of
solvent usage on Fischer–Tropsch reactors. The safety
metrics was based on the work by Pokoo-Aikins et al. [48],
and included four chemical specific indicators (flamma-
bility, toxicity, reactivity and vapor pressure) and two
process specific indicators (temperature and pressure).
Safety metrics have also been used during the process
synthesis phase for the comparison of process alternatives.
Pokoo-Aikins et al. [48] used the chemical and process
metrics mentioned above as part of a multi-criteria ap-
proach for screening process alternatives for the conver-
sion of sewage sludge to biodiesel. Thiruvenkataswamy
et al. [49] evaluated two alternative ethylene production
Figure 1
2%
process
9%
life cycle
10%
1%
supply chain
6%
transportation
72% storage
disposal
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering
Papers on safety published according to the ISI Web of Science.
processes using techno-economic and safety measures.
Safety was measured using the HIRA methodology to
obtain the Fire and Explosion Damage Index as a conve-
nient tool for application, given the preliminary stage of
development considered in this work. Lou et al. [50]
introduced a process security index to assess process
safety. Hassim and Hurme [51] and Hassim and Edwards
[52] developed methodologies for the assessment of
inherent occupational health and their inclusion in pro-
cess design. Li et al. [16] applied inherent safety index
(ISI) for sustainability assessment in biofuels at early
design.
Safety objectives have also been used in the design of
supply chains and macroscopic systems. El-Halwagi et al.
[53] developed a multi-objective optimization approach
for the synthesis of bio-refining supply chains with eco-
nomic and safety objectives. Here, safety was measured
through a risk quantification for the stages that are part of
a life cycle for the biorefinery. Similar approaches have
been used for municipal solid waste management [54], for
facility location and the interaction of processing facilities
with surround watersheds [55], for safe heat exchanger
network allocation [56], optimal placement of gas detec-
tors [57], facility layout problem considering toxic release
and mitigations systems [58] and for quantifying stability
points in a steady state operation [59].
Concluding remarks
A review on the development of safety indices has been
presented. Indices have been described and identified

Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2016, 14:42–48 www.sciencedirect.com


according to their nature, being it based on expert opinion
or on some type of quantitative metrics. The suitability
for the application of a proper safety index depends on the
stage of development of a given design project, as out-
lined in Table 1. Although major advances have been
observed in the development of safety indices, their
application remains subjective in nature. This can be
attributed to the amount of detailed process design data
needed as input. Process design relies heavily on model-
ing and simulation software that provide quick numerical
calculations including economic and environmental anal-
ysis. This offers the user insights into the process and
allows for design modification. Hence, the incorporation
of safety in process design requires the availability of
safety indices and analysis tool that can be automated and
integrated with modeling and simulation software. None-
theless, some recent efforts have been observed on the
application of safety metrics as part of the design of
several unit operations and chemical processes. This is
a field at the early stages of development. Therefore,
methodologies that combine quantitative aspects, such as
energy consumption or total annual costs of the system,
with subjective items, such as safety metrics, need to be
further developed. We should see important develop-
ments in this field in the near future.
Acknowledgements
This paper was made possible by NPRP grant No. 6-678-2-280 from the
Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The
statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
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Construct Eng Manage 2014, 140:9.
44. Patel SJ, Ng D, Mannan MS: Inherently safer design of solvent
processes at the conceptual stage: practical application for
substitution. J Loss Prevent Process Indus 2010, 23:483-491.
45. Medina-Herrera N, Jiménez-Gutiérrez A, Mannan MS:
Development of inherently safer distillation systems. J Loss
Prevent Process Indus 2014, 29:225-239.
46. Medina-Herrera N, Grossmann IE, Mannan MS, Jiménez-
 Gutiérrez A: An approach for solvent selection in extractive
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2016, 14:42–48
distillation systems including safety considerations. Indust
Eng Chem Res 2014, 53:12023-12031.
This paper presents a novel approach for the selection of solvents taking
both economic and safety metrics into account. Sets of optimal solutions
obtained through the application of a multiobjective optimization tech-
nique are reported.
47. Hamad NA, El-Halwagi MM, Elbashir NO, Mannan SM: Safety
assessment of potential supercritical solvents for Fischer–
Tropsch Synthesis. J Loss Prevent Process Indust 2013,
26:528-533.
48. Pokoo-Aikins G, Heath A, Mentzer RA, Mannan MS, Rogers WJ,
El-Halwagi MM: A multi-criteria approach to screening
alternatives for converting sewage sludge to biodiesel. J Loss
Prevent Process Indust 2010, 23:412-420.
49. Thiruvenkataswamy P, Eljack FT, Roy N, Mannan MS, El-
 Halwagi MM: Safety and techno-economic analysis of ethylene
technologies. J Loss Prevent Process Indus 2016, 39:74-84.
This paper presents the comparisons of two different ethylene technol-
ogies considering the economics and hazards of the technology. The
hazard quantification was done using a semi-quantitative safety index.
50. Lou HH, Muthusamy R, Huang Y: Process security assessment:
operational space classification and process security index.
Process Safety Environ Protect 2003, 81:418-429.
51. Hassim MH, Hurme M: Inherent occupational health
assessment during preliminary design stage. J Loss Prevent
Process Indus 2010, 23:476-482.
52. Hassim M, Edwards D: Development of a methodology for
assessing inherent occupational health hazards. Process
Safety Environ Protect 2006, 84:378-390.
53. El-Halwagi AM, Rosas C, Maria Ponce-Ortega J, Jimenez-
 Gutierrez A, Mannan MS, El-Halwagi MM: Multiobjective
optimization of biorefineries with economic and safety
objectives. AIChE J 2013, 59:2427-2434.
This article shows the application of a safety index together with eco-
nomic evaluations for the optimal design of full processes in the form of
biorefineries.
54. Santibañez-Aguilar JE, Martinez-Gomez J, Ponce-Ortega JM,
Nápoles-Rivera F, Serna-González M, González-Campos JB, El-
Halwagi MM: Optimal planning for the reuse of municipal solid
waste considering economic, environmental, and safety
objectives. AIChE J 2015, 61:1881-1899.
55. Martinez-Gomez J, Nápoles-Rivera F, Ponce-Ortega JM, Serna-
González M, El-Halwagi MM: Optimization of facility location
and reallocation in an industrial plant through a multi-annual
framework accounting for economic and safety issues. J Loss
Prevent Process Indust 2015, 33:129-139.
56. Vázquez-Román R, Inchaurregui-Méndez JA, Mannan MS: A grid-
based facilities allocation approach with safety and optimal
heat exchanger networks. Comput Chem Eng 2015, 80:92-100.
57. Benavides-Serrano AJ, Legg SW, Vázquez-Román R,
Mannan MS, Laird CD: A stochastic programming approach for
the optimal placement of gas detectors: unavailability and
voting strategies. Indus Eng Chem Res 2013, 53:5355-5365.
58. Dı́az-Ovalle C, Vázquez-Román R, de Lira-Flores J, Mannan MS: A
model to optimize facility layouts with toxic releases and
mitigation systems. Comput Chem Eng 2013, 56:218-227.
59. Wang H, Zhang N, Qiu T, Zhao J, He X, Chen B: A process design
framework for considering the stability of steady state
operating points and Hopf singularity points in chemical
processes. Chem Eng Sci 2013, 99:252-264.
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