Industry and robotics
Industrial risk spans process safety in plants that handle hazardous materials, the automation and robotics that change how plants fail, and the industrial base a country needs to recover from any shock.
- Institution
- The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
- Service level
- R0: information and enquiries
The short answer.
Industry and robotics as a field of risk covers production systems, automation, industrial safety and the resilience of manufacturing to shocks in inputs, energy, labour and technology. In the Nexus Consortium it is studied as science at GCRI by Trade and Strategic Resources as well as Advanced Industry and Robotics, governed at GRF by Innovation Nexus, and understood financially at GRA by Private Equity Nexus; this gateway links those platforms and the methods they share.
The field, seen three ways.
Low-frequency, high-consequence events and automation.
Major industrial accidents are rare at any single site and recurrent across an industry; their causes repeat (loss of containment, inadequate management of change, degraded safety barriers). Natural-hazard-triggered technological accidents, known as Natech events, combine both fields. Automation reduces some human error and introduces software and integration failure modes.
- Barrier management and safety-instrumented systems under IEC 61511 and IEC 61508.
- Natech risk where floods, earthquakes or heat reach hazardous installations.
- Industrial capacity for recovery: steel, cement, chemicals and equipment that reconstruction needs.
Process safety and machinery standards.
| Framework or body | What it governs or supplies |
|---|---|
| EU Seveso III Directive | Prevention and control of major-accident hazards involving dangerous substances |
| IEC 61508 and IEC 61511 | Functional safety of programmable systems and of process-industry safety-instrumented systems |
| CCPS risk-based process safety | Process safety elements and lessons from incidents |
| ISO 10218 | Safety requirements for industrial robots |
Plants, workers and supply.
- Work: occupational safety and automation's effect on tasks.
- Trade: industrial inputs and outputs in supply chains.
- Disaster: Natech events.
The science sits on Advanced Industry and Robotics; methods start from process safety.
The methods behind the field.
- Network science and contagion
- Optimization and operations research
- Econometrics
- Geospatial information systems
- Materials science and chemistry
- Urban and transport engineering
- Robotics and automation
- Process and industrial safety engineering
- Systems engineering
- Sensors, IoT and observation networks
- Energy generation, storage and grid technology
- Water and environmental engineering
- Policy, institutional and decision science
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning
- Financial economics and macro-finance
- Financial and risk engineering
- Scenario design and stress testing
Terms used on this page.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Industrial automation | The use of control systems, sensors and software to operate machines and processes with reduced human intervention. |
| Industrial robot | An automatically controlled, reprogrammable manipulator used in industrial automation, as defined by ISO. |
| Process safety | The management of hazards in facilities handling dangerous substances to prevent major accidents. |
| Operational technology | Hardware and software that monitor and control physical industrial processes. |
Where this page's references lead.
The bodies and documents this page is read against. Status and editions change; each link goes to the issuing body.
- EU Seveso III Directive on major-accident hazards (European Commission)
- IEC 61508 Functional safety of electrical, electronic and programmable systems (IEC)
- Center for Chemical Process Safety (AIChE CCPS), risk-based process safety
- ISO 10218 Robotics, safety requirements for industrial robots (ISO)
- UNIDO industrial statistics
Questions and answers.
Why does GCRI host field gateways?
Around GCRI.
Start with an enquiry.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.