Managing risk through safety barrier analysis

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2012

Authors

Sobral, J (Author) Other; Luis Andrade Ferreira (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: 11th International Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management Conference and the Annual European Safety and Reliability Conference 2012, PSAM11 ESREL 2012

Pages: 2159-2172

11th International Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management Conference and the Annual European Safety and Reliability Conference 2012, PSAM11 ESREL 2012

Helsinki, 25 June 2012 through 29 June 2012

Indexing

Scopus - 0 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-008-928

Abstract (EN): Risk control and risk management are major concerns in high risk industrial facilities. To face these challenges one can act in two fields, specifically prevention and protection, attempting to decrease the potential risk to acceptable values. Whatever the amount of prevention it's impossible to avoid the occurrence of undesirable events, so the presence of safety barriers is crucial to reduce the severity of the consequences of such events. This paper focuses the importance of reliability and maintainability of these safety barriers on its availability and functional safety, regarding all aspects and philosophy of RAMS Analysis (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety). The proposal is to create an approach of a model that could be used in any safety barrier, just to determine its success probability each time a demand occurs. In this paper the so-called RODS Methodology (Reliability Of Dormant Systems) allows to know the unavailability of specific components that are necessary in the start-up phase of these kind of equipment. The result of such methodology is the acquisition of the potential risk for each particular case based on the probability of failure on demand of a safety barrier. The RODS Methodology is here demonstrated for a specific safety barrier and some qualitative results came up as well as unavailability values allowing deciding in a sustainable mode about possible actions to carry out in the operation and maintenance of such equipment.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific