(93a) Use Operating/Historian Data to Verify Safeguards

Educated assumptions are made during the HAZOP / LOPA process about the initiating event frequencies and reliability of safeguards. It would be desirable if there were a digitized process to verify the reliability of these assumptions. It turns out that there is.

By collecting data from the Event Historian in a process plant, while using data mining and analytics, safeguard verification can be achieved, both for the control and safeguard systems. This process involves making sure that the events indicating the operation of a safeguard are digitally stored with an accurate timestamp and the desired data is easily filtered based on period of time or other parameters as per the user preference. You’re almost certainly collecting this data already.

This new capability doesn’t replace the need for testing and preventive maintenance. Instead, it supplements it – in ways that can find otherwise-hidden issues and can increase process safety dramatically. It also offers the opportunity to right-size inspection programs based on how well things are working in the field. Often, maintenance and testing intervals can be extended very safely – based on how well things are really working in your plant.

In this paper we will describe how the data can be used: to indicate the real-time health of active risk management Safeguards; to integrate the learnings as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as well as inputs to HAZOP/LOPA revalidations helping comply with IEC61511/ISA-S84 for the Operation and Maintenance phase of the Safety Life Cycle. We will illustrate with several real-world cases where extending testing by a year or more was very do-able.