RASS · Reliability assessment of safety systems

The appropriate management of major industrial risks requires the employment of advanced safety systems that can ensure an acceptable protection level for the workers, the surrounding population and the environment. Such an employment is practically an entire process that follows the lifecycle of those systems to ensure not only their ability to perform their intended functions but also to reduce the side effects of their integration into the system, which can be serious on many levels including safety itself. The main objectives of this project are:1. Develop an adequate framework to handle the uncertainty involved in the quantification of the main measures in the reliability assessment of safety systems, with the proposition of a practical implementation tool that facilitates its application by the associated engineers.2. Specify the nature of the systematic failures and their relationships with random failures and extract the contribution of the human and organizational factors, with an analysis of the possible differences between the different involved characteristics. 3. Propose and validate quantitative systematic safety integrity indicators that can be used in parallel and in consistency with those classical random-side measures to allocate the safety requirements and to assess the performance of the safety systems in a balanced manner. 4. Propose a coherent sub-phase in the overall safety lifecycle, which concerns the quantitative analysis aspects using a combination of the results of those treated points in addition to some other currently accepted practices in reliability assessments of safety systems. The main results and their places in the existing lifecycle models and safety management frameworks will be arranged as a sub-phase of the safety lifecycle, in particular those associated with the quantitative treatment of uncertainty and systematic failures aiming to contribute in enhancing assessment of the reliability of safety systems.