Realizing Smart Safety Management in the Era of Safety 4.0: A New Method towards Sustainable Safety

Safety 4.0 is a new stage of safety science coincident with the development of Industry 4.0. In Safety 4.0, safety researchers and professionals attach importance to the perspective of safety information and emerging technologies in safety management, and thus promote a new concept: smart safety management (SSM). However, there are still many gaps in its fundamental theory, and there are few fundamental studies on the concept and essence of SSM. In order to fill these gaps, this paper introduces a theoretical study on the method of SSM. Firstly, in order to clarify the concept of smartness in the era of information, we elaborate the smartness performance of artificial entities and the essence of smart safety capability on the basis of analyzing the smartness performance of smart safety entities (SSEs). Then, we review the new characteristics and requirements of organizational safety management research and practice in the era of Safety 4.0; on this basis, we propose the definition and connotation of SSM in the era of Safety 4.0, and elaborate the specific content of the SSM method. Specifically, we divide SSM into four modules, safety information processing, safety action, inspiring awareness of safety and internal optimization, and thus build the content model of SSM. By expounding the contents and steps of the four modules, we further elaborate how to conduct SSM in industrial organizations. Then, we propose a SSM ecosystem for realizing sustainable safety in industrial organizations and analyze the approaches to realizing SSM in coal mine safety production. Finally, we analyze the significance of SSM in supporting sustainable safety and discuss the practical challenges that SSM may encounter in the future. The results show that SSM is a method based on safety intelligence, and it can support sustainable safety through the four aspects of comprehensive function, safety predictability, safety awareness and continuous optimalization.