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New patent introducing AI to process safety to help reduce hazards

Published:  24 February, 2025

Schneider Electric, a leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, has announced its patent to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to help reduce the likelihood process safety hazards.

The company says the innovation automatically, or semi-automatically, analyses 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.

“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.”

The company says 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 reenforced learning to prevent hazardous scenarios in industrial automation.

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