A novel representation of the Seveso III Directive to manage dangerous substances in modern industrial plants

The industrial use of dangerous substances represents a significant concern in the safety domain, because it has the potential to cause accidents with severe consequences for both humans and the environment. The prevention of these accidents is further complicated by the intricate nature of modern industrial processes, which involve a diverse range of technological and social factors. Hence, the 2012/18/EU Directive – best known as the Seveso III Directive – applies in the EU territory establishing obligations and responsibilities for the operators of industrial plants where dangerous substances are used, handled, produced, and/or stored. The Directive aims to prevent major accidents and mitigate their impacts, by putting into action a set of processes to guide and enhance the plants’ safety management practices (e.g., the organization of inspections, the development and implementation of a Major-Accident Prevention Policy). Nevertheless, the ever-evolving interactions among technological, human, and organizational elements in such critical settings may lower the effectiveness of these practices. This research has the objective of investigating this problem: it aims to translate the Directive into a Knowledge Graph (KG) starting from a Safety Control Structure (SCS) of the system. The SCS offers a hierarchical representation of the system following the principles of systems theory and control theory. However, SCSs end up being really complicated and unusable representations when depicting large and complex systems. To this purpose, a KG is constructed to ease the use of SCS, eventually enabling enhanced possibilities for its analysis. This research provides a novel representation of the Directive that captures the evolving socio-technical complexity of modern industrial plants. The presented solution may serve as a reference for the various stakeholders involved in the safety management of industrial establishments dealing with dangerous substances.