To better understand what motivated the authors to produce this document, it is worth noting that, to date, no legislation has studied or created standards governing the construction, choice and application of such systems. Indeed, Impact Safety Barriers play a very important role for safety at work and help reducing maintenance costs; they are mostly installed in industrial plants to protect infrastructures (doors, walls and shelving), facilities (electrical panels, fire-fighting equipment, weighing systems, conveyor belts, workstations) and pedestrian crossings, as moving vehicles could possibly hit them.
Therefore, given the lack of standards, designers and users of these products face objective difficulty in assessing the numerous offers available on the market; since there are no rules defining the parameters for choice and application; the assessment process tends to be based more on the purchase price than on the true effectiveness of the Impact Safety Barrier which should, instead, be the real basis for safety and savings within the company.
The negative consequences of this dearth of legislation are inevitably borne by the end-users of the Impact Safety Barriers, as they may fall victim to inefficiencies, even serious ones, and above all, to a lack of legal protection.
The goal of STOMMPY is to provide the technical notions and the necessary procedure for the most appropriate choice of Impact Safety Barriers. The ISB Guideline is useful to all those involved in the assessment of company risks, whether it concerns the preservation of company infrastructures, plants and machinery, or the accident prevention for personnel, especially due to moving vehicles.
This document also provides the analysis and the development procedure for an assessment of company risks within goods handling areas, to support the company choices that aim at reducing the risks regarding the work activities in the examined area.
Finally, it is essential to underline how choosing the right Impact Safety Barrier benefits not only the work efficiency, but the entire company economy. In fact, improving safety in work environments means reducing: the accident risk coefficient, annual contributions to INAIL (Italian national institute for insurance against industrial accidents) and maintenance costs due to moving vehicles hitting plants, machinery and infrastructures.
For this reason, the Guideline is applicable to all work environments, regardless of the product sector.
The Guideline, through technical notions, aims to be an easy, practical and effective help tool for the end user, helping him in his evaluation process of passive safety systems and in the evaluation procedure of the risks related to moving vehicles within the work area and how these risks can also be eliminated or reasonably contained, according to the most correct risk analysis and assessment system, and how the necessary performance parameters are easily calculated in order to choose the most appropriate Impact Safety Barriers.