Accounting for Safety Barriers Degradation in the Risk Assessment of Oil and Gas Systems by Multistate Bayesian Networks

In this paper, a multistate Bayesian Network (BN) is proposed to model and evaluate the functional performance of safety barriers in Oil and Gas plants. The nodes of the BN represent the safety barriers Health States (HSs) and the corresponding conditional Failure Probability (FP) values are assigned. HSs are assessed on the basis of specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) related to the barrier characteristics (i.e., technical, procedural or organizational, continuously monitored or event-based characterized). FP values are estimated from failure datasets (for technical barriers), evaluated by Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) (for operational and organizational barriers) and assigned by expert elicitation (for barriers lacking data or information). For illustration, the multistate BN model is developed for preventive barriers and applied to a case study related to the potential release of flammable material in the slug catcher of a representative O&G Upstream plant which may lead to major accident scenarios (fire, explosion, toxic dispersion). The results from the case study demonstrate that the multistate BN model is able to account for the safety barriers HS and their associated functional performance.