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Publications
Sobral, J. and Guedes Soares, C. (2017), “Physical safety barriers behaviour based on RAM analysis using DEMATEL method”, 27th European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2017), 18-22 June, Portoroz, Slovenia
Organizations need to manage and control risk. Risk is always present in every activity or process and could be related to people, business or environment.
In some installations safety is crucial regarding the objectives and social responsibilities of the organization. Managers, technicians and engineers try to avoid the occurrence of undesirable events and reduce or mitigate their consequences. To face this it is common to establish some preventive measures and implement protective systems, often called safety barriers. However, these safety barriers can also fail and thus their safety function could not be accomplished, leading to catastrophic consequences for people, installation or even for the environment. The behaviour of safety barriers is very important to determine if catastrophic situations will not occur. Safety barriers should be always available when needed and be reliable during their mission.
Safety barriers can be simply named as barriers, defences, protections, layers or even safety functions (Sklet, 2006). The classification of safety barriers is also motive for distinctive approaches. A simple classification refers physical and non-physical barriers just to point out something that was systems thought during the design and construction phases and something that is considered administrative or organizational, like safety procedures (Sobral & Guedes Soares, 2015).
The present paper deals with physical safety barriers, as important means to achieve a low risk in most of the industrial facilities. In order to analyse the behaviour of physical safety barriers on the accomplishment of their function some factors are observed regarding the availability of such equipment and the inherent probability of failure on demand (PFOD).
A higher availability of the safety barrier is directly related to the existence of reliable items, to its maintainability and to an efficient maintenance support activity. It means that Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) can have a huge importance on the safety barrier behaviour.
For each one of these topics several factors are described and their causal relations are identified and quantified using the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method. These factors include, for example, the existence of redundancies, the frequency of tests, the degree of monitoring coverage and system complexity.
The DEMATEL method has been widely accepted as one of the best tools to solve the cause an
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