16th International Symposium on Loss Prevention and Safety Promotion in the Process Industries and accompanying exhibition

Welcome to the 16th EFCE International Symposium on Loss Prevention and Safety Promotion in the Process Industries! After 45 years, this most prestigious conference in the world in the field of risk and safety related to the chemical and process industries, has returned to the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Since its first edition in 1974 in Delft,  occupational and process safety professionals, researchers, scientists, academics and practitioners have been meeting on a triennial basis at the EFCE Loss Prevention Symposia somewhere in Europe. In this period the Loss Prevention Symposia series has been successful in stimulating and sharing both theoretical and practical knowledge among the Loss Prevention community and considerable progress has been achieved in the field of safety in the chemical and process industries worldwide. Actually, even more industries are involved and have been profiting from advances in safety knowledge. Industries such as oil and gas, energy, pharmaceutical, food, manufacturing companies and the related service industries also use chemicals on a daily basis and are very much involved as well.

We are experiencing challenging times due to exciting technological advances, for instance in communication and social media, as well as fast-developing societal developments, for example in the field of security, which will require further research and applications for improvement in order to adequately cope with them. Exchanging information, disseminating data and stimulating the development of new methods to reduce the risk of incidents/accidents in the process industries, is indeed a must and a need. To foster new ideas, the fourth “EFCE Excellence Award for Process Safety” for outstanding PhD research work will be presented at this conference.

Transfer to practice is as important as development of know-how, and many challenges are still to be addressed in order to make further progress in safety, and process safety in particular. To name a few: developing worldwide databases of near-misses and accidents to learn from them after the example of the airline industry, bringing domino effects into risk assessment software, development and employment of user-friendly and effective security risk assessment models, development of the resilience engineering approach, harmonized education of process safety , using economic theories and models into safety and security decision making, strategic safety cooperation within chemical industrial parks, and just culture implementation.

Let us therefore take the opportunity of this 16th Loss Prevention Symposium, to learn from each other and exchange best practices, to transfer experience by presenting new scientific results and concepts, learn from case studies, and to preserve existing know-how for the benefit of the process industries at large, as well as the safety and security of employees and the public.

Bruno Fabiano
Chairman WP Loss Prevention  

Gary Pilkington
Secretary WP Loss Prevention                     

Genserik Reniers
Chairman Organizing Committee Loss Prevention 2019