Peter Sonnemans - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Peter Sonnemans
Effective safety management: A case study in chemical industry
Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 2004
ABSTRACT A major non-trivial problem within the area of industrial safety management today is to ... more ABSTRACT A major non-trivial problem within the area of industrial safety management today is to analyse, next to the safety impact of the technical equipment, the safety impact of a ‘business process’ as currently required by regulation and safety standards.This paper describes a case study of a pesticide company struggling with the question of how to improve the safety of their operational process further and at the same time also improve the reliability of their operational process. According to the literature ‘control of the business process’ is the keyword to improve the safety and reliability ‘performance’ of a company. A formal control model is proposed together with a classification system (using maturity levels) to analyse and qualify business processes with respect to their impact on process safety.This method has been applied in a case study where it resulted in a model of a business process. Using the model it was possible to classify the business process control system used and to identify related improvement opportunities. The proposed method showed that, in contrast to the company's perception, it was not the production department that was responsible for most of the problems but the peripheral processes relating to the production department. The interaction between departments caused not only potential safety problems, but also caused system reliability problems. For the company it was demonstrated that the interdependency of the (different activities in the-) operational process is an essential element preventing further improvement if not addressed properly. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Reliability prediction through Bayesian inference based on product change
2009 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2009
This paper provides a methodology to determine the reliability of a system, when only limited inf... more This paper provides a methodology to determine the reliability of a system, when only limited information about the system (in this case a patient table of a medical scanning system) is available. With this methodology, Bayesian inference, different sources of information (expert knowledge and field data) can be combined, and the uncertainty that is inherent to reliability prediction when only
Soft reliability, a new class of problems for innovative products: "how to approach them
Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2005. Proceedings., 2005
ABSTRACT This paper explores the possibility to model aspects of non-technical field complaints, ... more ABSTRACT This paper explores the possibility to model aspects of non-technical field complaints, which are an increasingly important category of problems, especially for high innovative consumer products. The established model is based on the Innovation Diffusion Model of Rogers [Ref 1] and addresses when which category of non-technical problems can be expected. Preliminary data from case study research on actual field complaint data and experimental consumer test data support some of the theoretical expectations that were derived from the models. The obtained insights offer the possibility to explore new product developments on potential non-technical field complaints that can be expected in the future in a more effective and efficient way.
How safety-investments increase performance: a practical case
Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium. 2002 Proceedings (Cat. No.02CH37318), 2002
ABSTRACT Prevention of incidents at manufacturing facilities, where hazardous material is process... more ABSTRACT Prevention of incidents at manufacturing facilities, where hazardous material is processed, is a must. Operational efforts in this area are often primarily focused on production and not on safety. A most important reason, as this paper shows, is that the effectiveness of safety investments can neither be calculated nor measured nor traced back adequately, while the effects of production investments immediately show up in terms of profitability. Market share and competition reinforce that attention is primarily focused on production. This paper shows that risk reduction as well as performance improvement can be achieved by better control of the operational processes. In this paper, a method is presented to model, analyse and qualify the control of an operational process. Basic concepts are formally defined, from which a reference model, the so-called 'basic controlled process' is derived. Real life processes can be compared to this reference model. Differences between model and reality are categorized and the control-ability of the real life process can be qualified. Subsequently, the formalism is applied to a real life situation, by means of a case study. It is clearly shown that the presented formalism offers the possibility to analyse the 'control-ability' of an operational process and to identify its most serious deficiencies. From this case, it can be concluded that local control of sub-processes is no guarantee that the operational process on company level is also controlled
Reliability prediction for complex medical systems
RAMS '06. Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2006., 2006
... D, Eindhoven University of Technology, Tim Wensing, Eindhoven University of Technology ... Ac... more ... D, Eindhoven University of Technology, Tim Wensing, Eindhoven University of Technology ... According to Lawless and Nadeau (1995), this estimator is defined as followings: The objective is to estimate the rate of occurrence of failures )( 3 t µ , having observed 1 ... i i ir t t ≤ at ...
Software complexity and testing effectiveness: An empirical study
2009 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2009
This paper presents a simple method for evaluating the effectiveness of testing strategies by usi... more This paper presents a simple method for evaluating the effectiveness of testing strategies by using the relation between software reliability and software complexity. A wide range of metrics from the literature are being tested for their suitability in measuring changes in software complexity of software code at different levels of system partitioning. Reliability data from software tests and operational data
Identifying factors influencing reliability of professional systems
2008 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2008
Modern product development strategies call for a more proactive approach to fight intense global ... more Modern product development strategies call for a more proactive approach to fight intense global competition in terms of technological innovation, shorter time to market, quality and reliability and accommodative price. From a reliability engineering perspective, development managers would like to estimate as early as possible how reliably the product is going to behave in the field, so they can then
2008 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2008
This paper addresses the problem how to represent diverse field usage of professional systems in ... more This paper addresses the problem how to represent diverse field usage of professional systems in an efficient way, so that field usage can be incorporated in reliability tests. With diverse we mean the variability in system use in the field.
Accidents: A discrepancy between indicators and facts!
Safety Science, 2008
Despite, the overwhelming amount of currently available safety management systems (and accompanyi... more Despite, the overwhelming amount of currently available safety management systems (and accompanying tools) accidents with hazardous substances still occur every now and then in the process industries.In this paper a large number of recently occurred accidents in the process industries are analysed showing that reoccurring disruptions during daily operation were present in the causal path of these accidents. The reoccurring disruptions can be seen as pre-warning signals. Their existence forms a gap with the common proactive safety indicators. This gap exists of information, already present and available in daily operation, of which it is UNKNOWN (to the local assessor) that it may lead to unsafe situations/accidents, e.g. maintenance backlogs, quality reports, etc.It is argued that these reoccurring events should be considered to be included in the safety indicators after assessment by an extended body of knowledge, because these events seem to become increasingly important regarding the prevention of accidents that still occur nowadays.
Managing product reliability in business processes ‘under pressure’
Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 2005
Product reliability is often seen as a product attribute. Models with different degree of sophist... more Product reliability is often seen as a product attribute. Models with different degree of sophistication analyze and predict the reliability of a product as a function of the internal structure (such as components and their relation). The practical relevance of these models, in relation with the (business) processes in which the related products are actually used, is not often addressed.
Quality and Reliability Problems from a Consumer's Perspective: an Increasing Problem Overlooked by Businesses?
Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 2006
Currently, many businesses in the consumer electronics industry are facing an increasing number o... more Currently, many businesses in the consumer electronics industry are facing an increasing number of consumer complaints, despite the application of quality tools that proved to be very powerful in the past. We assessed over 20 new product development projects, to understand the ...
Accidents, often the result of an ?uncontrolled business process??a study in the (Dutch) chemical industry
Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 2003
ABSTRACT Often companies in the (petro-) chemical industry claim that all possible countermeasure... more ABSTRACT Often companies in the (petro-) chemical industry claim that all possible countermeasures against potential accidents have been taken and therefore accidents are unforeseeable. In this paper we question this statement by analysing the pre-warning signals (precursors) preceding a number of industrial accidents. 17 accidents that occurred in the (petro-) chemical industry have been investigated by exploring FACTS, an accident database containing information about industrial accidents worldwide. This paper will demonstrate that the existence of precursor information could have been used to foresee and even prevent these accidents if a proper control action had been initiated. The accidents are analysed further, according to a control model, which was adapted from that of C. Argyris. It demonstrates the ineffectiveness of several elements of business process control loops and that the so-called ‘double-loop learning’ cycle is more important than the ‘single-loop learning’ cycle if one considers safety improvement. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Effective Safety Management: a Case Study in the Chemical Industry
Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 2004
ABSTRACT A major non-trivial problem within the area of industrial safety management today is to ... more ABSTRACT A major non-trivial problem within the area of industrial safety management today is to analyse, next to the safety impact of the technical equipment, the safety impact of a ‘business process’ as currently required by regulation and safety standards.This paper describes a case study of a pesticide company struggling with the question of how to improve the safety of their operational process further and at the same time also improve the reliability of their operational process. According to the literature ‘control of the business process’ is the keyword to improve the safety and reliability ‘performance’ of a company. A formal control model is proposed together with a classification system (using maturity levels) to analyse and qualify business processes with respect to their impact on process safety.This method has been applied in a case study where it resulted in a model of a business process. Using the model it was possible to classify the business process control system used and to identify related improvement opportunities. The proposed method showed that, in contrast to the company's perception, it was not the production department that was responsible for most of the problems but the peripheral processes relating to the production department. The interaction between departments caused not only potential safety problems, but also caused system reliability problems. For the company it was demonstrated that the interdependency of the (different activities in the-) operational process is an essential element preventing further improvement if not addressed properly. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Accidents in the chemical industry: are they foreseeable?
Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 2006
... These repetitive disruptions were part of the causal path, according to the information in FA... more ... These repetitive disruptions were part of the causal path, according to the information in FACTS. So, in hindsight, we may conclude that in all of these cases there were indeed signs present that could have been used as indicators for the subsequent accident. ...
International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 1991
Efficiency in solving differential equations is improved by increasing the order of a Taylor seri... more Efficiency in solving differential equations is improved by increasing the order of a Taylor series approximation. Computing time can be reduced up to a factor of 40 and an amount of memory storage can be saved, up to a factor of 70.
IEEE Software, 2000
0 7 4 0 -7 4 5 9 / 0 7 / $ 2 5 . 0 0 © 2 0 0 7 I E E E
Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 2010
Despite the increased understanding of how accidents occur in the chemical process industry, toda... more Despite the increased understanding of how accidents occur in the chemical process industry, today's safety measures and indicators do not prevent these accidents from occurring. Finding a way to better, proactively, identifying precursors to imminent safety risks, could help organizations to focus their limited resources. The protocol proposed and demonstrated in this paper shows a way to do this. Basis is to examine usually low consequence, high likelihood reoccurring disruptions or deviations in the process (e.g. defects, disturbances, anomalies) for their relevance to process safety and define those possibly leading to accidents as 'precursors'. As a next step ineffective supervising and managerial control processes and their underlying latent conditions, causing the persistence of these precursors, are identified and it was shown how these cause safety barriers to become ineffective and to open the way to accidents. In conclusion, this paper demonstrates that the proposed 7-stage protocol developed to this end can explicitly and proactively indicate safety risks, and find the controlling latent conditions causing the trouble. It will help organizations to direct their resources to improve safety, which will include their control structure and their normal way of working and will yield higher efficiency as a side benefit.
Effective safety management: A case study in chemical industry
Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 2004
ABSTRACT A major non-trivial problem within the area of industrial safety management today is to ... more ABSTRACT A major non-trivial problem within the area of industrial safety management today is to analyse, next to the safety impact of the technical equipment, the safety impact of a ‘business process’ as currently required by regulation and safety standards.This paper describes a case study of a pesticide company struggling with the question of how to improve the safety of their operational process further and at the same time also improve the reliability of their operational process. According to the literature ‘control of the business process’ is the keyword to improve the safety and reliability ‘performance’ of a company. A formal control model is proposed together with a classification system (using maturity levels) to analyse and qualify business processes with respect to their impact on process safety.This method has been applied in a case study where it resulted in a model of a business process. Using the model it was possible to classify the business process control system used and to identify related improvement opportunities. The proposed method showed that, in contrast to the company's perception, it was not the production department that was responsible for most of the problems but the peripheral processes relating to the production department. The interaction between departments caused not only potential safety problems, but also caused system reliability problems. For the company it was demonstrated that the interdependency of the (different activities in the-) operational process is an essential element preventing further improvement if not addressed properly. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Reliability prediction through Bayesian inference based on product change
2009 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2009
This paper provides a methodology to determine the reliability of a system, when only limited inf... more This paper provides a methodology to determine the reliability of a system, when only limited information about the system (in this case a patient table of a medical scanning system) is available. With this methodology, Bayesian inference, different sources of information (expert knowledge and field data) can be combined, and the uncertainty that is inherent to reliability prediction when only
Soft reliability, a new class of problems for innovative products: "how to approach them
Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2005. Proceedings., 2005
ABSTRACT This paper explores the possibility to model aspects of non-technical field complaints, ... more ABSTRACT This paper explores the possibility to model aspects of non-technical field complaints, which are an increasingly important category of problems, especially for high innovative consumer products. The established model is based on the Innovation Diffusion Model of Rogers [Ref 1] and addresses when which category of non-technical problems can be expected. Preliminary data from case study research on actual field complaint data and experimental consumer test data support some of the theoretical expectations that were derived from the models. The obtained insights offer the possibility to explore new product developments on potential non-technical field complaints that can be expected in the future in a more effective and efficient way.
How safety-investments increase performance: a practical case
Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium. 2002 Proceedings (Cat. No.02CH37318), 2002
ABSTRACT Prevention of incidents at manufacturing facilities, where hazardous material is process... more ABSTRACT Prevention of incidents at manufacturing facilities, where hazardous material is processed, is a must. Operational efforts in this area are often primarily focused on production and not on safety. A most important reason, as this paper shows, is that the effectiveness of safety investments can neither be calculated nor measured nor traced back adequately, while the effects of production investments immediately show up in terms of profitability. Market share and competition reinforce that attention is primarily focused on production. This paper shows that risk reduction as well as performance improvement can be achieved by better control of the operational processes. In this paper, a method is presented to model, analyse and qualify the control of an operational process. Basic concepts are formally defined, from which a reference model, the so-called 'basic controlled process' is derived. Real life processes can be compared to this reference model. Differences between model and reality are categorized and the control-ability of the real life process can be qualified. Subsequently, the formalism is applied to a real life situation, by means of a case study. It is clearly shown that the presented formalism offers the possibility to analyse the 'control-ability' of an operational process and to identify its most serious deficiencies. From this case, it can be concluded that local control of sub-processes is no guarantee that the operational process on company level is also controlled
Reliability prediction for complex medical systems
RAMS '06. Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2006., 2006
... D, Eindhoven University of Technology, Tim Wensing, Eindhoven University of Technology ... Ac... more ... D, Eindhoven University of Technology, Tim Wensing, Eindhoven University of Technology ... According to Lawless and Nadeau (1995), this estimator is defined as followings: The objective is to estimate the rate of occurrence of failures )( 3 t µ , having observed 1 ... i i ir t t ≤ at ...
Software complexity and testing effectiveness: An empirical study
2009 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2009
This paper presents a simple method for evaluating the effectiveness of testing strategies by usi... more This paper presents a simple method for evaluating the effectiveness of testing strategies by using the relation between software reliability and software complexity. A wide range of metrics from the literature are being tested for their suitability in measuring changes in software complexity of software code at different levels of system partitioning. Reliability data from software tests and operational data
Identifying factors influencing reliability of professional systems
2008 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2008
Modern product development strategies call for a more proactive approach to fight intense global ... more Modern product development strategies call for a more proactive approach to fight intense global competition in terms of technological innovation, shorter time to market, quality and reliability and accommodative price. From a reliability engineering perspective, development managers would like to estimate as early as possible how reliably the product is going to behave in the field, so they can then
2008 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2008
This paper addresses the problem how to represent diverse field usage of professional systems in ... more This paper addresses the problem how to represent diverse field usage of professional systems in an efficient way, so that field usage can be incorporated in reliability tests. With diverse we mean the variability in system use in the field.
Accidents: A discrepancy between indicators and facts!
Safety Science, 2008
Despite, the overwhelming amount of currently available safety management systems (and accompanyi... more Despite, the overwhelming amount of currently available safety management systems (and accompanying tools) accidents with hazardous substances still occur every now and then in the process industries.In this paper a large number of recently occurred accidents in the process industries are analysed showing that reoccurring disruptions during daily operation were present in the causal path of these accidents. The reoccurring disruptions can be seen as pre-warning signals. Their existence forms a gap with the common proactive safety indicators. This gap exists of information, already present and available in daily operation, of which it is UNKNOWN (to the local assessor) that it may lead to unsafe situations/accidents, e.g. maintenance backlogs, quality reports, etc.It is argued that these reoccurring events should be considered to be included in the safety indicators after assessment by an extended body of knowledge, because these events seem to become increasingly important regarding the prevention of accidents that still occur nowadays.
Managing product reliability in business processes ‘under pressure’
Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 2005
Product reliability is often seen as a product attribute. Models with different degree of sophist... more Product reliability is often seen as a product attribute. Models with different degree of sophistication analyze and predict the reliability of a product as a function of the internal structure (such as components and their relation). The practical relevance of these models, in relation with the (business) processes in which the related products are actually used, is not often addressed.
Quality and Reliability Problems from a Consumer's Perspective: an Increasing Problem Overlooked by Businesses?
Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 2006
Currently, many businesses in the consumer electronics industry are facing an increasing number o... more Currently, many businesses in the consumer electronics industry are facing an increasing number of consumer complaints, despite the application of quality tools that proved to be very powerful in the past. We assessed over 20 new product development projects, to understand the ...
Accidents, often the result of an ?uncontrolled business process??a study in the (Dutch) chemical industry
Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 2003
ABSTRACT Often companies in the (petro-) chemical industry claim that all possible countermeasure... more ABSTRACT Often companies in the (petro-) chemical industry claim that all possible countermeasures against potential accidents have been taken and therefore accidents are unforeseeable. In this paper we question this statement by analysing the pre-warning signals (precursors) preceding a number of industrial accidents. 17 accidents that occurred in the (petro-) chemical industry have been investigated by exploring FACTS, an accident database containing information about industrial accidents worldwide. This paper will demonstrate that the existence of precursor information could have been used to foresee and even prevent these accidents if a proper control action had been initiated. The accidents are analysed further, according to a control model, which was adapted from that of C. Argyris. It demonstrates the ineffectiveness of several elements of business process control loops and that the so-called ‘double-loop learning’ cycle is more important than the ‘single-loop learning’ cycle if one considers safety improvement. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Effective Safety Management: a Case Study in the Chemical Industry
Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 2004
ABSTRACT A major non-trivial problem within the area of industrial safety management today is to ... more ABSTRACT A major non-trivial problem within the area of industrial safety management today is to analyse, next to the safety impact of the technical equipment, the safety impact of a ‘business process’ as currently required by regulation and safety standards.This paper describes a case study of a pesticide company struggling with the question of how to improve the safety of their operational process further and at the same time also improve the reliability of their operational process. According to the literature ‘control of the business process’ is the keyword to improve the safety and reliability ‘performance’ of a company. A formal control model is proposed together with a classification system (using maturity levels) to analyse and qualify business processes with respect to their impact on process safety.This method has been applied in a case study where it resulted in a model of a business process. Using the model it was possible to classify the business process control system used and to identify related improvement opportunities. The proposed method showed that, in contrast to the company's perception, it was not the production department that was responsible for most of the problems but the peripheral processes relating to the production department. The interaction between departments caused not only potential safety problems, but also caused system reliability problems. For the company it was demonstrated that the interdependency of the (different activities in the-) operational process is an essential element preventing further improvement if not addressed properly. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Accidents in the chemical industry: are they foreseeable?
Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 2006
... These repetitive disruptions were part of the causal path, according to the information in FA... more ... These repetitive disruptions were part of the causal path, according to the information in FACTS. So, in hindsight, we may conclude that in all of these cases there were indeed signs present that could have been used as indicators for the subsequent accident. ...
International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 1991
Efficiency in solving differential equations is improved by increasing the order of a Taylor seri... more Efficiency in solving differential equations is improved by increasing the order of a Taylor series approximation. Computing time can be reduced up to a factor of 40 and an amount of memory storage can be saved, up to a factor of 70.
IEEE Software, 2000
0 7 4 0 -7 4 5 9 / 0 7 / $ 2 5 . 0 0 © 2 0 0 7 I E E E
Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 2010
Despite the increased understanding of how accidents occur in the chemical process industry, toda... more Despite the increased understanding of how accidents occur in the chemical process industry, today's safety measures and indicators do not prevent these accidents from occurring. Finding a way to better, proactively, identifying precursors to imminent safety risks, could help organizations to focus their limited resources. The protocol proposed and demonstrated in this paper shows a way to do this. Basis is to examine usually low consequence, high likelihood reoccurring disruptions or deviations in the process (e.g. defects, disturbances, anomalies) for their relevance to process safety and define those possibly leading to accidents as 'precursors'. As a next step ineffective supervising and managerial control processes and their underlying latent conditions, causing the persistence of these precursors, are identified and it was shown how these cause safety barriers to become ineffective and to open the way to accidents. In conclusion, this paper demonstrates that the proposed 7-stage protocol developed to this end can explicitly and proactively indicate safety risks, and find the controlling latent conditions causing the trouble. It will help organizations to direct their resources to improve safety, which will include their control structure and their normal way of working and will yield higher efficiency as a side benefit.