Dynamic Safety Barrier Management System: A Practical Approach to Achieve Process Safety Excellence

Oil & Gas production is a capital intensive industry characterized by inherent complex hazards that could lead to catastrophic large scale incidents impacting human life, environment & business continuity. Applying safety barrier management to model and assess operational risk and its cumulative effect can be an effective way to ensure & justify safe operations.

Safety barriers can be categorized mainly into hard barriers & soft barriers. Hard barriers such as equipment & technology and soft barriers such as people competencies & workflow processes. Safety barrier integrity deteriorates by time, exposing facility to higher operational risks. Monitoring barriers status and maintaining its functionality and integrity at target levels should be the organization main goals if it aims to achieve process safety excellence.

This paper will illustrate a practical approach to build an integrated dynamic barrier based risk management tool that regularly interact with multiple data sources and reporting systems, collect information about barrier performance and conclude barrier status with minimum human intervention based on pre-defined rule-sets established by the organization. Then, accordingly, estimate the cumulative risk raised from these barriers impairments taking into consideration the physical location of barriers and its inter-dependencies and finally, recommend corrective actions to be taken by the right personnel to control such risk.

Comprehensive bow-tie risk models with different level of abstraction are embedded in the infrastructure of the system, such models define and map safety barriers with respect to major accident hazards that they safeguard. While data sources provide information regarding Safety Critical Elements impairment, overdue maintenance, inhibition and overrides, safe operating envelope and incidents/near misses.

Building dynamic barrier system is as complex as it sounds yet, it’s considered the most powerful tool in controlling Major Accident Hazards and managing operational risks in structural consistent and efficient manner.