Knowledge management and major industrial hazards : an integrated approach

Abstract : The reflection that followed the Toulouse 2001 accident has stressed the fact that there was an urgent need for a coherent and trustable information about industrial hazards. This is true for the public who needs to be informed about the surrounding risks but it is also, and all the more, true for the industrial operators who have the responsibility to assess the risk and take the necessary provisions to reduce it, the workers who face the risk everyday and the competent authorities, in charge of the control. With this context in mind, INERIS is developing a series of tools for the knowledge management in the context of industrial major hazards. The aim is to make accessible the right information to the right person at the right moment. For this purpose, it is necessary to clearly analyze the needs of the different actors of industrial risks management and then to propose the structure of the system that will support and make the knowledge available. This paper presents the results of this preliminary analysis. It describes the first features of the system developed in the framework of this project, PRIMARSIK , and illustrates how it was built in a fully integrated approach of knowledge management. PRIMARSIK is not only a way to make different models and data available but it is also a way to provide the structure for future capitalization of the knowledge.