Wenzel H. (coordinator) Industrial Safety and Life Cycle Engineering. Technologies, Standarts, Applications

VCE Vienna Consulting Engineers ZT GmbH, IRIS project, 2013. — 656 p.The activities involved in value chain-based production have become more complex with an increasing amount of interdependencies, new technologies, and materials that introduce new risks in an ever-changing environment. At the same time, all of society has become more risk-averse.Until the start of the IRIS project in 2008 very little had been done to identify industrial risk factors systematically and risk assessment and management were largely characterized by its methodical diversity and fragmented approach. A shift to a new safety paradigm was therefore required to combine a more competitive, innovative, and better risk-informed industry with a safer society in mind. This is precisely what IRIS has done in a systematic and structured way as duly illustrated through several large-scale demonstrations performed together with the industry. The protests have been done to cover and visualize as many aspects of potential risks in the industry as possible, while keeping the user's safety in mind, to better mitigate future risks.The main concept of IRIS was to focus on diverse industrial sectors' main safety problems as well as to transform its requirements into integrated and knowledge-based safety technologies, standards, and services. The IRIS Risk Paradigm is based on three steps:
1) System modeling;
2) Risk quantification;
3) Uncertainty estimation.It is a comprehensive generic framework for risk management with the use of several interconnected tools. The demonstrations of the value of the IRIS Risk Paradigm have been awe-inspiring indeed, some at a nearly unprecedented scale for an EU project (e.g. the destructive testing of an existing bridge on motorway A 1 in Austria) and have led to new CEN standardization in the area. The data obtained through the demonstrations have led to results that can be applied globally and have yielded technical competitive expertise in Europe that will have long-lasting consequences for industrial safety as well as public safety. This is exactly the kind of results that are targeted in the European Framework Program for Research and provides the "reason d'etre" for its existence. A project like IRIS is of course not possible without a team of world-class experts in the field. In the case of IRIS, this team consisted of 37 different partners from 14 countries in the European Union and 3 global partners as well as many tore collaborators outside the project. AII was bound together and catalyzed by the efficient and competent management from the Coordinator Johannes Kepler University Linz and VCE that enabled the team to deliver all the envisioned objectives. Every team has a champion. For the IRIS project, this champion was Dr. Helmut Wenzel, without whom the project would never have even started and without whom it would not have been possible to achieve such a successful outcome. On behalf of DG RTD and the European Commission, I would like to congratulate the consortium on such an excellent outcome and hope that the obtained results will have a lasting impact on our future.