General goal 
FUNCTIONARY aims to establish a set of guiding principles for functional safety (FS) in the chemical process 
industry following a novel, enriched, science-based approach. These guiding principles should lead to more 
reliable and lean FS measures and designs. Ideally, they already anticipate and account for a shift in the 
approach towards producing (base) chemicals: from monolithic plants, designed to produce for several 
decades, to modular and flexible solutions with many FS challenges. The set of guiding principles will be 
verified through generic industrial use cases, for which field data will be made available through the 
essenscia Process Safety Academy (EPSA) and its industrial members. 
Concrete goals and criteria: 
To achieve the general goal described above, and to tackle the major shortcomings of the current approach 
towards FS, the following concrete objectives and criteria are specified: 

• Pillar I objective: To develop guidance for risk analysis to objectify risk reduction as input for FS. To 
do so, the following criteria are set:  
o I.1: Enable risk analysis based on a science-based reactor model; 
o I.2: Reduce cost for risk analysis by 25%; 
o I.3: Develop a general safeguarding philosophy for the process industry; and 
o I.4: Reduce uncertainty on risk analysis by an order of magnitude of the risk matrix.  
This objective and its criteria will be pursued within WP2.  

• Pillar II objective: To establish a framework to assess cybersecurity risks, considering connectivity 
between cybersecurity and FS. To do so, the following criteria are set:  
o II.1: Map the connectivity between IT (information technology, i.e. back-end computers and 
networks), OT (operational technology, i.e. field controllers and networks) and SISs, so that 
a harmonised security-aware safety (SeSa) methodology can be designed for 2 case 
templates inspired by the industrial partners and subject to FS as well as cybersecurity risks; 
o II.2: Enrich the 2 case templates with a sufficient amount of operational data, allowing for a 
data-driven approach where safety and security assessments are combined; and 
o II.3: Translate lessons learned from these representative cases into an adapted SeSa 
methodology, i.e. a framework with ‘typical’ solutions that can be reused in future designs. 
This pillar will bridge the (currently separated) worlds of FS and cybersecurity. This objective and 
its criteria will be pursued within WP3. 

• Pillar III objective: To balance the risks, costs and responsibilities over the whole lifecycle of FS 
equipment. To do so, the following criteria are set:  
o III.1: Expand the connection between reliability and safety with costs; 
o III.2: Clarify the influence of human factors on the triangular relation "high-compliance 
reliability, actual safety and operability”, i.e. how to tune the SISs complexity to remain 
operable, safe, and reliable, whilst minimizing the risk due to poor understanding of complex 
systems;  
o III.3: Objectify the cost of FS equipment based on scientific disclosure of data; and 
o III.4: Demonstrate that less complex systems can outperform more conservative, complex 
SISs in terms of cost-effectiveness and risk reduction, and communicate this with chemical 
companies as well as vendors of SISs.  
This objective and its criteria will be pursued within WP4.  

Achieving the objectives for these 3 pillars will result in a set of guiding principles that (depending on the 
pillar) will become available as a software tool and/or as written rules/framework. Furthermore, it will 
become possible to challenge the current approach to developing FS measures and designs in the chemical 
process industry. Within FUNCTIONARY, this set of guiding principles will be applied to generic industrial use 
cases in WP5.