Welcome to

Welcome to the 18th EFCE International Symposium on Loss Prevention and Safety Promotion in the Process Industries!

After 12 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 Italy, in Bologna, the site of the oldest European university. 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. This prestigious symposium comes back to Italy where the 14th edition held in Florence faced emerging challenges in those days related to process safety and transfer to practice, e.g., closing the loop from operational experience back to design and development of the newly introduced resilience engineering approach.

Over the years, the Loss Prevention Symposia series has been successful in stimulating and sharing both theoretical and practical knowledge among the Loss Prevention community.
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 operating in the energy, pharmaceutical, food, transportation, manufacturing sectors and in the related services also use chemicals and/or hazardous materials on a daily basis and are exploiting the safety knowledge matured withing years of academic and industrial research, development and practice.

These are challenging times due to the need to contrast climate change with new decarbonized technologies and with adaptation strategies, as well as to raise the safety and security of production and storage sites. New opportunities and new vulnerabilities proceed hand in hand with the advancement of IT technologies and data analytics. Smart and interconnected systems unlock the potential of new production processes, but need to contrast the risk of complex cascading events.
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 promote dissemination of results and to foster new ideas, the sixth "EFCE Excellence Award for Process Safety" for outstanding PhD research work will be presented at this conference.

Transfer to practice is as important as the development of know-how, and many challenges still need 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 able to provide an effective support to data analytics and lesson learning, addressing climate-related risks bridging climate models to Natech scenario modelling and prevention, developing user-friendly and effective models for cascading events in security and cyber-security scenarios, further developing resilience engineering, harmonized education of process safety, economic theories and models into safety and security decision making, develop specific approaches to unfold the potential of artificial intelligence applied to process safety.
Let us therefore take the opportunity of this 18th 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, of the workers and of the society at large.