Abstract
Barriers are used in various forms to assure the safety of chemical plants. A deep understanding of the literature related to safety barriers is essential to tackle the challenges in improving their design and management. This paper first provides an overview of the history of the development of the safety barrier concept. Subsequently, this paper elaborates a systematic review of the definition, classification, evaluation, performance assessment, and management of safety barriers in the chemical process industries. Based on the literature review, this study proposes a practical classification of safety barriers benefiting the identification of performance indicators and the collection of indicator-related data for safety barriers. The safety barrier functions are extended and illustrated by involving the resilience concept. Performance assessment criteria are proposed corresponding to the adaptability and recoverability of the safety barriers. Finally, the management of safety barriers is discussed. The roadmap for future studies to develop integrated management of safety and security barriers to ensure the resilience of chemical plants is suggested.
Highlights
As a commonly used term to present preventive measures, safe guards, mitigation measures, and protective layers to prevent or miti gate accidents, “safety function” or “safety barrier” is generally used
Based on the above studies related to barrier management, we found that the concept of safety barrier has been applied in chemical process industries for a long time, challenges still exist in the manage ment and optimal allocation of safety and/or security barriers
We suggest several aspects should be improved regarding resilience-based management of barriers. i) Some efforts can be made on developing dynamic quantitative resilience assessment methodologies targeting barrier systems. ii) A resilience-based management system needs to be developed to tackle the inspection and maintenance of safety barriers considering the operations during the whole resilient process. iii) The principles for barriers design should be investigated, and the approaches for barrier optimization and optimal allocation need to be improved from a resilience perspective
Summary
As a commonly used term to present preventive measures, safe guards, mitigation measures, and protective layers to prevent or miti gate accidents, “safety function” or “safety barrier” is generally used. The latter concept originated from the energy model (Gibson, 1961). The concept and functions of the so-called “safety barrier” were elaborated by Hollnagel in 1999 (Hollnagel, 1999a, 1999b) before some researchers tried to interpret and define safety barriers clearly to reduce mis conceptions in work related to risk management and accident preven tion (Duijm et al, 2004). ISO standards (Iso:13702, 1999; Iso:17776, 2000; Iso:13702, 2015; Iso:16530, 2017) provided the requirement of safety barriers to prevent and mitigate accidents in the petroleum and natural gas industries, and they elaborated on the importance of employing safety barriers to reduce the probability of accidents and reduce the consequences caused by the accidents
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