Variability of safety risks in production environments

One of the major steps between (re-)configuration of a factory and the start of production is the commissioning phase, where certification of safety requirements and assessment of potential hazards is a key activity. Typically, assessment of safety risks is a manual process that incorporates the experience and knowledge of the involved stakeholders. The flexibility and the speed gained by automated (re-)configuration of production environments is decelerated by the manual safety certification process, before the factory can start production. This paper is an attempt to eliminate this bottleneck by proposing a model-driven approach to safety risk assessment. An approach based on several models of safety risks enables potential safety risks to be "instantiated"for any given factory at hand. This shortens the recurring process of identifying the risks. A model-driven approach was chosen to capture and utilize the tacit knowledge of the involved stakeholders.