Abstract
In process industries, including refineries, petrochemical plants, air fractioning plants, Oil and gas depots, there are many hazards for workers (both for employees and contractors). Occupational Hazards include thermal extremes, high concentration of toxic or flammable gas and low concentration of oxygen. These hazards are usually controlled by means of procedures, operating instruction, gas sensors, alarms, personal and collective protection equipment. Whilst a few hazards are well known and localized inside the plants, for instance the classified confined spaces or the classified ATEX areas, in other cases, hazards are associated to a high uncertainty, hence, it’s difficult to find a trade-off between the precautionary safety requirements and the work practicality and easiness. The worker, moreover, must be protected, when the hazard is present but cannot be overwhelmed by heavy protection or oversize solution. The potential of IoT enabling technologies, including smart sensoring and human-machine communication, have a huge potential for reducing the uncertainties in hazard detection and promoting a more dynamic approach. The main idea is the adoption of a solution based on wearable and fixed sensors used to dynamically monitoring the environments in order to provide, in real time, information about situation context in order to help the workers to better estimate the actual level of risk. The use of IoT poses new problems, including web security, privacy, workers’ union acceptance. The implementation of IoT solution requires a special attention to these details, in order to avoid defeats in innovation projects. The paper illustrates the preliminary results developed inside the INAIL Bric project SmartBench related to the use of IoT and RFID beacons to provide information in real time about the equipment, the environment and the worker’s physical condition.
