Whitepaper
Man vs Machine: The Evolution of Human Operators in Process Safety
The most industrial processes today rely on functional safety, a framework of Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS), to prevent hazardous scenarios for people, environment and facilities. We deploy a range of tools to assess these overall functional safety of your Safety Instrumented System, using different methodologies to identify the hazards, determine the Safety Integrity Levels for your safety instrumented systems and to perform the SIL Verification as part of the SIS design.
International standards such as IEC 61508 and IEC 61511 define functional safety requirements for electronic systems and industrial applications in an effort to ensure that organizations maintain robust protections for all their processes.
With our functional safety consulting services, we carry out Functional Safety Assessments (FSA) to ensure that your SIS includes the required Safety Instrumented Functions (SIFs) and that these are effective and reliable and maintain the required Safety Integrity Levels (SILs) through all the Safety Lifecycle. Our experts are knowledgeable and experienced in evaluating systems based on relevant international standards and thrive on collaboration with your team to improve your organization’s overall functional safety.
Our approach is guided by the knowledge that, while standards may be universal, each organization is unique. With this in mind, we develop customized assessment procedures for our clients defining the scope of the assessment, the assessors, participants of the FSA team, the planning of the FSA and the information that will be generated as a result of the FSA activity. According to this specially designed procedure:
Our experts base their assessments on the guidelines provided by international standards such as IEC 61508/61511 to determine the required reliability of Safety Instrumented Functions (SIFs) and to ensure that SIFs are designed and operated correctly. These guidelines include the following:
To determine the SIL for each SIF, several semi quantitative methodologies can be used. A risk-based review of the protection systems using Layers Of Protection Analysis (LOPA) or a Risk Graph methodology is recommended. The SIL is determined based on the semi-quantitative estimation of the frequency of the initiating event, and the severity of the hazardous scenario, as well as the effective Independent Protection Layers (IPLs).
A SIL verification assessment is typically carried out after a SIL determination study to review if the design of the SIF achieves the safety requirements and the required SIL. During this phase, the technology and architecture are defined and it requires a calculation of the SIL.
The evaluation of a SIF involves the analysis of the reliability and the architecture of the SIS according to the standards.
Validation procedures should provide assurance that the safety requirements specifications of the SIS have been met and that any recommendations from earlier verification activities and reviews have been satisfactorily addressed.
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