Sustainable Risk and Safety Management of Complex Industrial Systems

Dear Colleagues,

To sustainably develop the production of oil and gas fuel, consumer chemicals, electricity power, etc., the risk and safety management, as one of the most important parts of the corresponding complex industrial systems, presents a heightened level of intricacy and challenge.

Fundamentally, this complexity of various industrial systems is due to a multitude of factors that must be considered, such as the interdependencies among system components, the potential for unforeseen interactions, and the dynamic nature of these industrial systems. Therefore, it is obvious that ensuring the safety and managing the risks within such environments require sophisticated strategies, a deep understanding of the system’s behavior, and the application of advanced analytical tools and methodologies.

To prevent and mitigate the loss in the complex industrial systems, the corresponding risk should be verified comprehensively at first, and then, there it is reasonable risk and safety management, which means risk and its assessment are the optimization object and the essential procedure of safety management.

In the past decades, the relevant risk and safety management models, methods, and technologies have been rapidly developed and extensively applied for complex industrial systems. Risk and safety management is a critical step in any organization’s efforts to proactively reduce risk before an injury or catastrophe occurs. However, efforts are still needed to explore more and better models, methods, and technologies for making safety second nature such as the following:

1) Managing safety means managing risk, and managing risk means paying attention to abnormality. The main problem is how to pay attention to abnormality in a timely and effective manner. With an improvement in automation in the process industries, most enterprises have gradually focused on the abnormality alarm management based on the DCS, SCADA, and APC. However, there are many problems in the process alarm management, such as improper alarm setting, incorrect alarm response, alarm floods, chattering alarm, and so on. These problems will reduce the safety of production devices, and even lead to malignant accidents. The discussion and study of the challenges of alarm management (e.g., alarm root analysis, alarm threshold setting, alarm priority division, alarm type identification, etc.) will contribute to achieving effective risk management in the process industries.

2) With a growing number of new information technologies being applied in the complex industrial systems, cybersecurity has quickly become an essential component in maintaining the safe and continued operations of industrial facilities, because cybersecurity attacks on industrial automation and control systems can have physical impacts, which means that the integration of physical safety and cybersecurity should be considered into future risk and safety management.

3) Other studies involved in the field of risk and safety management can focus on the theories about generalization, characterization, and applicability of related models, methods, and technologies, through combining with some other disciplines like system science, complexity science, and network science.

Therefore, we put forward a Special Issue on “Sustainable Risk and Safety Management of Complex Industrial Systems”. And we hope that the research findings will help us to highlight the latest advances in the field of risk and safety management of complex industrial systems and outline the possible issues that need to be further explored to better provide a solid scientific basis and technological support for global and regional sustainable safety.

The research topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Literature review related to risk and safety management;
• Case study/application of risk and safety management tools for complex industrial systems;
• Models, methods, and technologies of risk and safety management;
• Process hazard evaluation;
• Process fault detection, diagnosis, and pre-warning;
• Alarm analysis, prediction, and management for complex industrial systems.

Dr. Zhan Dou
Dr. Lei Ni
Dr. Qianlin Wang
Dr. Xu Diao
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• complex industrial systems
• risk management
• safety management
• complex science and engineering
• models, methods, and technologies of risk and safety management