Schneider Electric, the leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, announced its patent to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to help reduce the likelihood process safety hazards. The innovation automatically, or semi-automatically, analyzes potential process hazards and validates protection mechanisms in an industrial process. It is then possible to prevent hazards using an analysis tool by engaging protective mechanisms to the process.

As more industries embrace digital transformation and generate high-quality data, the advantages of implementing AI in day-to-day operations increases. This latest patent from the EcoStruxure Triconex Safety team has the potential to identify potential hazards and safeguards in a process.

Process safety management can then take advantage of industrial, real-time data to revalidate HAZOP studies to prevent industrial hazards and save lives.

"We are the first to push this boundary of automating the hazard process analysis with artificial intelligence," said Chris Stogner, Schneider Electric's senior director of offer management. "Bringing AI to functional safety has the potential to create a more rigorous and robust HAZOP study, generating more combinations of scenarios and deviations then what was humanly possible before."

This patent is a part of a strategic initiative to enhance functional safety using AI. It is now possible to simulate hazards, with varying conditions, and then attempt to prevent dangerous conditions by using a process hazard analysis tool to generate protective mechanisms to the process. Three other Schneider Electric patents incorporating AI into functional safety lifecycle are currently pending. News of the innovation comes as there is a growing interest in combining human ingenuity in functional safety analysis with strategic implementation of reinforced learning to prevent hazardous scenarios in industrial automation.