Arpel’s Environment, Health, and Safety Committee, together with the Institute for a Culture of Safety (ICSI), organized a webinar on “Safety Intelligence: Data-Driven Safety,” which featured special participation from PAE.

Diego Turjanski, Branch Manager of ICSI Latam, introduced the concept of Safety Intelligence in his presentation, inspired by the logic of epidemiology: just as this discipline derives valuable insights through a population-based approach, safety can benefit from systematic, data-driven analysis.

Safety Intelligence has two main areas of application: one aimed at helping front-line operators through technologies such as smart glasses, proximity sensors, and AI tools; and another focused on supporting system managers with cluster analysis, precursors, and video analytics.

It was emphasized that the greatest knowledge gap lies in this second area, making it essential to define—on an empirical basis—which events truly contribute to serious accidents, rather than limiting measurement to high-frequency indicators with no predictive value.

Three levels of data acquisition were described—serious accidents, high-energy events, and precursors—along with the challenges associated with each.

Expert analysis is crucial for building valid models, as safety is neither a homogeneous issue nor one that can be fully automated. The ultimate objective of this approach is to reduce uncertainty: understanding which categories hold the highest probability of serious accidents makes it possible to prioritize resources and make informed decisions, even in the absence of absolute certainty.

Following this initial theoretical segment, Sergio Fernández, Corporate Safety Manager at Pan American Energy, explained how Safety Intelligence is being applied in PAE’s operations to prevent accidents, particularly serious ones.