An integrated model-based approach for evaluating and improving safety instruments in continuous process from the viewpoints of maintainability, reliability and availability - Case study: Offshore industry

The objective of this paper is to present a framework for assessing and improving safety equipment items performance based on maintainability, reliability and availability. The main idea is to employ Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Importance Analysis (IA) to provide insight on safety equipment items performance. The validity of the model is verified and validated by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Furthermore, a non-parametric correlation method, namely, Spearman correlation experiment shows a high level of correlation between the findings of PCA and DEA. At first PCA is used for assessing the performance of safety equipment items and ranking them. IA is then performed for the worst safety equipment item which could have most impact on the overall system effectiveness to classify their components based on the Component Criticality Measures (CCM). The analysis of the classified components can ferret out the leading causes and common-cause events to pave a way toward decreasing failure interdependency and magnitude of incidents which ultimately maximize overall operational effectiveness.