Commonly used chemicals number more than four billion worldwide today, but an adequate understanding of the inherent properties of these materials exists only for several hundred thousands of them. Therefore, unexpected hazards or even accidents are difficult to avoid during preparation, transportation, manufacturing, storage and even disposal periods. Among these, hazards due to hydroperoxides...

The Institute of Medicine recently issued a landmark report on medical error.1 In the penumbra of this report, every aspect of health care is subject to new scrutiny regarding patient safety. Informatics technology can support patient safety by correcting problems inherent in older technology; however, new information technology can also contribute to new sources of error. We report here a cate...

Process safety analysis is necessary for analyzing and assessing in detail the inherent hazards in chemical processes. We have developed a tool (called PHASuite) to assist experts conducting process safety analysis. PHA is knowledge intensive, and the analysis capacity and quality of PHASuite depend exclusively on the quality of domain knowledge. It is, however, impossible and impractical to en...

Detecting safety critical situations that may arise in the evolution of Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems is of primary importance in the analysis of their behavior. The inherent complexity of ATM systems, typically involving a large number of agents, makes this analysis prohibitive today. Compositionality has been an effective way of tackling this problem. We present a compositional framewo...

(CMR) is an increasingly attractive imaging modality for the evaluation of patients with cardiovascular disease. It displays important inherent safety advantages: namely its noninvasive nature and the absence of exposure to ionizing radiation, or potentially nephrotoxic iodinated contrast agents. However, there are several potential hazards associated with magnetic resonance (MR) scanning of sp...

Improved understanding of fear inhibition processes can inform the etiology and treatment of anxiety disorders. Safety signals can reduce fear to threat, but precise mechanisms remain unclear. Safety signals may acquire attentional salience and affective properties (e.g., relief) independent of the threat; alternatively, safety signals may only hold affective value in the presence of simultaneo...

This paper presents a generic and systematic methodology for the generation of sustainable process alternatives with respect to new process design as well as retrofit design. The generated process alternatives are evaluated through sustainability metrics, environmental impact factors as well as inherent safety indices. The process alternatives for new process design as well as retrofit design a...