Performance analysis of safety instrumented systems against cascading failures during prolonged demands

Abstract

Cascading failures may occur in many technical systems where the failure of one component triggers successive events. Safety barriers like safety instrumented systems are installed in many industries to prevent failures and failure propagations. However, little attention has been paid to the impacts of safety instrumented systems employed to prevent cascading failures in the literature. This paper proposes a novel method for analyzing how the performance of safety instrumented systems influences the protection against and mitigation of cascading failures. It considers SIS reliability and SIS durability in the mitigation of cascading failures. The method uses recursive aggregations based on the reliability block diagram and is verified with Monte Carlo simulations. The application is illustrated with a practical case study, where the proposed method is found beneficial to identify the criticality of safety instrumented systems in consideration of their locations and performance.