Safety management is among the most important aspects of industrial management. Particularly, in big companies which are characterized by active work environments and complex production systems. In such cases, it is a must to identify the risks and assess the reliability of the systems first, in order to be able to optimize performance and productivity. For this purpose, the current paper proposes an automated safety and reliability checking ontology (ASRCO), which is basically a knowledge model that uses rule-based reasoning. The model uses OWL (Ontology Web Language) to formalize the relevant knowledge domain, while SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) rules are used to define the safety and reliability checking constraints. The model is aimed at facilitating the sharing of knowledge related to equipment safety and reliability, and is therefore intended for use by technicians and engineers in the departments of quality, reliability and maintenance, in industrial companies. An empirical knowledge example is presented in Protégé environment to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed solution.