SK chemicals installs safety evaluation system at Ulsan plant

[Photo provided by SK chemicals]

SK chemicals announced on Tuesday that it installed an artificial intelligence (AI)-based safety evaluation system at its Ulsan plant, which produces green chemical products including copolyesters and recycled materials.

The company said that this is the first time a South Korean company has applied generative AI to enhance a Safety, Health, and Environment (SHE) system within a production setting.

The new system leverages decades of safety management documentation, expertise, and case studies accumulated by SK chemicals at its Ulsan facility. Using this extensive data, OpenAI’s AI model GPT-4 was trained to identify and suggest potential hazards that could arise during plant operations.

SK chemicals aims to use the AI-driven SHE system to assess risk within the plant. This approach is expected to elevate the overall safety management standards in the production environment by overcoming the limitations of traditional risk assessments, which heavily depend on the expertise of individual authors and reviewers.

The development of this AI-based system originated from ideas proposed by an on-site worker and was developed in collaboration with SK discovery’s DX Lab. The initiative underscores SK chemicals’ commitment to digital innovation as it actively incorporates feedback from the field to ensure that AI-driven practices are effectively integrated and continuously improved.