Proposing Safety Metrology for Loss Prevention in the Process Industries: An Interdisciplinary Bridge and Its Theoretical Pillars Towards Sustainable Risk Management

The qualitative and experience-dependent nature of traditional safety management in high-hazard process industries (e.g., chemical, petrochemical, oil & gas) poses significant challenges to scientific decision-making and cross-domain benchmarking. To address this, we propose and systematically construct Safety Metrology as a nascent sub-discipline of safety science with direct relevance to process safety engineering. Through a comprehensive analysis of disciplinary evolution, societal demands, and theoretical foundations, this study develops a conceptual framework characterized by ‘benchmarking, consistency, and reliability’, supported by a four-dimensional theoretical pillar (philosophy, safety science, metrology, and interdisciplinarity). The findings demonstrate that Safety Metrology provides the methodological bedrock for achieving quantifiable, comparable, and actionable safety management in complex process systems, thereby facilitating a paradigm shift towards data-driven safety governance in complex systems and contributing to sustainable risk management in high-hazard industries.