1. Introduction
The safety management audit described in this paper
has been developed within the context of the ARAMISproject
[1], which is fully explained elsewhere in this special
issue. Although primarily aimed at companies that fall under
the European Seveso-regime, the audit is not necessarily
restricted to such companies. While major hazard scenarios
are its prime input, the underlying management system
controlling these is considered sufficiently generic to cover
most issues of safety management.
The ARAMIS audit builds on experiences gained with the
I-Risk Management Audit (IRMA audit technique) [2,3] that
was developed within an prior European project I-RISK [4].
The main improvement appears to be a more concrete focus
on barriers rather than the base events of fault trees, like time
to repair or error rate. Nevertheless, the establishment of a
valid link between the quantitative world of fault and event
trees (technical model) and the qualitative world of barrier reliability and its management control (management model)
remains a challenge.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the audit in
more detail. First, the model underlying the audit will be
outlined followed by a description of the barrier concept. Barriers
are conceived here in a somewhat different way, which
will be discussed below. Thereafter, the development of the
audit manual will be described and some initial experiences
obtained with the audit will be sketchily reported. The paper
closes with an evaluation of the audit technique and a glimpse
of future developments.