Data-driven approaches: Use of digitized operational data in process safety

Process safety is playing an important role with the rapid development of industry. With the advent of the Big Data era, various and massive data from the Internet of Things can be used for process safety. In this chapter, we aim to provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding of rapidly growing data-driven process safety approaches in the chemical industry. Data-driven approaches primarily use past process data without a complex mechanism model of chemical properties or processes; hence, they have advantages in practical industrial applications. In this chapter, first, we describe the importance of data in process safety. Then, we briefly introduce the ideas and methods of data pre-processing. We follow this with a discussion on statistical-based and artificial intelligence-based data-driven approaches. Then, we elaborate on the application of data-driven methods in the field of chemical process safety. Finally, we provide a summary and outlook for advancing data-driven methods.