On the use of criteria based on the SMART acronym to assess quality of performance indicators for safety management in process industries

Management of safety, and barriers in particular, includes using information expressing performance, i.e. use of safety performance indicators. For this information to be useful, the indicators should demonstrate adequate quality. In other words, they should satisfy some predefined set of quality criteria. Without showing adequate quality, the indicators are generally unable to provide sufficient support for barrier management, which could result in poor decisions. In this article, the use of the SMART criteria is considered to assess the quality of safety performance indicators in process industries. SMART being an acronym for ‘specificity’, ‘measurability’ or ‘manageability’, ‘achievability’, ‘relevancy’ and ‘time-based’, covering five key aspects and criteria for assessing the quality of an indicator. A discussion on whether the indicators are able to demonstrate adequate quality by satisfying these criteria has been conducted. The finding is that all of the SMART criteria should be satisfied for a safety performance indicator to demonstrate acceptable quality and to be regarded as useful to support barrier management decision-making. However, it has also been observed that including the ‘M’ criterion in the assessment of quality is not needed. When all the other criteria are satisfied there is no way the conclusions could be misleading as a result of measurability or manageability aspects. Hence, for safety performance indicator quality, only four of the criteria are assessed and suggested for such situations to shorten the acronym to ‘STAR’. A key safety indicator used in downstream process facilities, i.e. ‘dangerous fluid overfilling events’, motivated from the 2005 Texas City refinery accident, is used to illustrate the situation. The indicator is also applied to another incident, the Buncefield oil storage depot's accident in 2005, to provide a broader context for using it. The findings in this article could also be applied beyond the context studied. This means that, despite focusing on safety indicators in the process industries, the findings are considered as relevant and applicable to other types of performance indicators and to other energy industries.     

An economic and environmental framework for analyzing globally sourced auto parts packaging system

Competitive forces are driving US domestic manufacturers to source parts globally, which significantly extends their supply chain and introduces new sustainability concerns. This paper addresses the situation from an operating division manager's perspective. We present an approach to packaging system assessment which considers the division manager's span of control, addresses the design of packaging and the corresponding logistics processes, and incorporates both cost and environmental impacts. A construct familiar to operations managers, the value stream map, is adapted to model material flow of both parts and packages, and an integrated material flow analysis is used as the common basis for cost analysis, a modified life cycle environmental impact analysis, and an energy consumption analysis. The framework is illustrated using a case study of a major US automaker.     

Supplementing Land-Use Statistics with Landscape Metrics: Some Methodological Considerations

Landscape monitoring usually relies on land-use statistics whichreflect the share of land-sue/land cover types. In order tounderstand the functioning of landscapes, landscape pattern mustbe considered as well. Indicators which address the spatialconfiguration of landscapes are therefore needed. Thesuitability of landscape metrics, which are computed from thetype, geometry and arrangement of patches, is examined. Two casestudies in a surface mining region show that landscape metricscapture landscape structure but are highly dependent on the datamodel and on the methods of data analysis. For landscape metricsto become part of policy-relevant sets of environmentalindicators, standardised procedures for their computation fromremote sensing images must be developed.     

Great Lakes monitoring results--comparison of probability based and deterministic sampling grids

The Great Lakes may be viewed as a coastal environment, affected by the same meteorological and physical forces as the coastal ocean. The U.S. EPA, Great Lakes National Program Office (GLNPO) has monitored the open waters of the lakes, annually, since 1983. As part of the U.S. EPA Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP), a pilot study was performed in Lake Michigan to compare the existing GLNPO deterministic sampling grid with the EMAP probabilistic grid. Results of chemical analyses of trophic status indicators (total phosphorus and chlorophyll a) as well as nutrients and conventional limnological measurements, from spring and summer surveys in 1992 indicate little difference between the grids in the offshore region of the lake. The few statistically significant differences may be due to station distribution throughout the lake, or simple chance. This might be expected due to the well mixed nature of the open waters of Lake Michigan. The detection of a long-term trend for total phosphorus in Lake Michigan benefits from an annual program: viewing cumulative frequency distributions based on a four year EMAP interval does not convey information on the decrease in phosphorus in the lake. If the EMAP sampling grid were to be used in the Great Lakes, pilots in each of the lakes would be necessary for utilization of the existing long-term record as a basis for trend detection.     

Environmental assessment of agriculture at a regional scale in the Pampas of Argentina

Governments need good information to design policies. However, inthe Argentine Pampas there are neither sufficient knowledge on environmental issues, nor clear perception of environmental alterations across space and time. The general objective of this work was to provide decision makers with a scientifically sound set of indicators aiming at the assessment of current status andfuture trends in the rural environment of this sensitiveregion. As driving criteria to select indicators, weassumed that they had to be sound, simple to calculate,easy to understand, and easily applicable by decision makers. They are related closely to significantecological structures and functions. Twelve basicindicators were identified: (1) land use, (2) fossil energyuse, (3) fossil energy use efficiency, (4) nitrogen (N)balance, (5) phosphorus (P) balance, (6) nitrogencontamination risk, (7) phosphorus contamination risk, (8) pesticide contamination, (9) soil erosion risk, (10) habitatintervention, (11) changes in soil carbon stock, and (12) balance of greenhouse gases. Indicators were geographicallyreferenced using a geographic information system (GIS). Thestrength of this study is not in the absolute value ofenvironmental indicators, but rather in theconceptualization of indicator and the identification ofchanging patterns, gradients and trends in space and time.According to our results, we can not definitely say thatagriculture in the Pampas, as a whole, tends to besustainable or not. While some indicators tend to improve,others keep stable, and the rest worsen. The relative importance among indicators must also be considered. The indicators that showed a negative net change are key to the identification of critical problems that will require special attention in the close future.     

Effect of El Nĩno on demographic,morphological, and chemical parameters in turtle-grass (Thalassia testudinum): an unexpected test of indicators

We examined the response of demographic, morphological, and chemical parameters of turtle grass (Thalassia testudinum), to much-higher-than-normal rainfall associated with an El Niño event in the winter of 1997–1998. Up to 20 inches of added rain fell between December 1997 and March 1998, triggering widespread and persistent phytoplankton blooms along the west coast of Florida. Water-column chlorophyll concentrations estimated from serial SeaWiFS imagery were much higher during the El Niño event than in the previous or following years, although the timing and magnitude of phytoplankton blooms varied among sites. Seagrass samples collected in 1997, 1998, and 1999 provided an excellent opportunity to test the responsiveness of Thalassia to decline and subsequent improvement of water quality and clarity in four estuaries. Using a scoring technique based on temporal responsiveness, spatial consistency, and statistical strength of indicators, we found that several morphological parameters (Thalassia shoot density, blade width, blade number, and shoot-specific leaf area) were responsive and consistent measures of light stress. Some morphological parameters, such as rhizome apex density, responded to declines and subsequent improvement in water clarity, but lacked the statistical discriminating power necessary to be useful indicators. However, rhizome sugar, starch, and the total carbohydrate concentrations also exhibited spatially and temporally consistent variation as well as statistical strength. Because changes in shoot density, as well as water clarity, affect rhizome carbohydrate levels, a composite metric based on Thalassia shoot density and rhizome carbohydrate levels together is probably more useful than either parameter alone as an indicator of seagrass health.     

Modeling and Measurement of Structural Changes at a Landscape Scale in Dryland Areas

We present a technique to quantify and model the intensity of structural changes produced by management of dry grazing lands at a landscape scale. The technique is illustrated with the analysis of digitized black–white (b/w) imagery and an application to the study of changes induced by grazing gradients. Structural changes in patchy vegetation canopies were studied in the Patagonian Monte (Chubut, Argentina) at two resolution scales by means of linear transects in the field (50 m) and others drawn on aerial b/w photographs (2–5 km) of grazed paddocks. Spatial series of plant cover values along transects in the field and on photographs were analyzed with standard techniques of spectral analyses, including auto-correlation spectra and Fourier transforms. In order to test the internal consistency of the techniques used, synthetic plant canopies with patches of varying cover and size were generated by means of a stochastic model of plant growth under different stocking rates or after varying periods of recovery. The behavior of the simulation model is consistent with the observed dynamics of plant canopies in semiarid environments. There is a consistent relation between the number and geometric properties of plant patches (patch number, patch size, patch connectivity) and the signal/noise ratios of the Fourier decomposition describing plant density data. Signal/noise ratios corresponding to plant cover data in paddocks with different grazing treatment are consistent with the assumptions derived from modeled canopies, as well as those estimated from optical density of b/w aerial photographs of paddocks. We tested the hypotheses that patch arrangements as quantified by the signal/noise ratios vary in accordance with grazing gradients in paddocks with a permanent corner-located watering point. The use of digitized b/w images allows inspecting permanent changes over time periods when other types of images were not yet available.     

Condensed atmospheric photooxidation mechanisms for isoprene

Two condensed mechanisms for the atmospheric reactions of isoprene, which differ in the number of species used to represent isoprene's reactive products, have been developed for use in ambient air quality modehng. They are based on a detailed isoprene mechanism that has recently been developed and extensively evaluated against environmental chamber data. The new condensed mechanisms give very close predictions to those of the detailed mechanism for ozone, OH radicals, nitric acid, H₂O₂, formaldehyde, total PANS, and for incremental effects of isoprene on ozone formation in one day simulations. The effects of the condensations become somewhat greater in multi-day simulations, particularly in cases where NO₃ reactions are important at nighttime, but the ozone predictions are still very close. On the other hand, the SAPRC-90, RADM-2, and Carbon Bond IV isoprene mechanisms give quite different predictions of these quantities. It is recommended that the new mechanisms replace those currently used in airshed simulations where isoprene emissions are important.     

规划环境影响评价指标体系及评价方法浅析

对规划环境影响评价的内容作出了概述性的介绍，并根据规划环境影响评价的特点，得出规划环境影响评价的指标体系应包括自然环境指标、生态环境指标、资源利用指标、能源利用指标和社会经济指标5大体系。列举了当前适用于规划环境影响评价的技术方法，并对其进行简单的对比分析。