Homayoun Lahijanian - Department of Industrial Engineering , Iran University of Scuence and Technology (IUST), Tehran, Iran
Ehsan Khavandkar - Department of Industrial Engineering , Iran Uiversity Scuence and Technology (IUST), Tehran, Iran

Recent major accidents of disasters have highlighted the need for addressing safety pro-actively. In addition to this, the emergences of new regulations and international standards have driven organizations to improve their safety performance. As a result of this, organizations have some extent shifted from a reactive approach to a proactive approach to safety. The traditional approach to improve the safety of port processes is to introduce additional safety equipment and protective devices such as valves, alarms, safety interlocks , and other active system to detect leaks and process deviations. When new problems arise, more add-on protective equipments are installed to deal with them. In the end, what results is a system whose design is complicated by numerous layers of expensive , add-on protective equipments which often constitute a significant part of the operating cost. An alternative approach is to assist the safety engineers in ports, identify creative design solutions that overcome the technical conflicts in designing safe process. This paper suggests an analytical approach to creative safety problem solving in ports in which special attention is given to TRIZ, a popular method for systematic creativity. We present a brief overview of the different methods for enhancing creativity support and present a set pf characteristics , principles, as well as a safety engineering contradiction matrix based on port’s critical safety factors to deal with inherently safe process design in ports.

TRIZ ; safety ; Ports ; Creative safety problem solving ; Innovation ; Conflict