VIRTHUALIS is the largest European Research Project on Industrial Safety.

Promoted by the European Commission within the 6th Framework Programme, and coordinated by Polytechnic of Milan. VIRTHUALIS joins 42 partners among universities, research centers and private companies from all over Europe. The aim of the project is to produce an innovative technology that integrates Virtual Reality and Human Factors (HF) methods to improve safety in production plants and storage sites. The major advantage will be enhancing the availability of HF methods, which are rarely considered in safety analyses, by embedding and visualizing them in a virtual environment.

According to recent studies, human errors represent the major cause of risks and accidents in many industries such as chemical and petro-chemical. These errors are connected with enormous damage and financial losses. To improve safety in these industries, there is a need for an integrated safety concept for the entire production life cycle, which also considers human failures and malfunctions. The goal of the project will be to visualize different safety scenarios, to analyze possible causes of human error and to support making necessary safety decisions.

Within the framework of VIRTHUALIS, safety scenarios in the selected industrial domain (currently the process industry) will be developed, covering the following safety actions: Risk Assessment, Accident Investigation, Safety Management and Training. The VIRTHUALIS project started the 1st of May 2006, and will last for four years; it has an overall budget of 15 Mio €, nine of which are funded by the European Union and the rest co-funded by the partners.

For more information please refer to the project web site: www.virthualis.org