One of the challenges of functional safety is to stay up to date with the latest developments and best practices in the industry. Functional safety is a relatively young engineering discipline, so the state of the art is still evolving at a fast pace. Just a few years ago, perfect proof testing was a common assumption and mission time was rarely considered. Which of today’s assumptions will be superseded by a better practice tomorrow?
The lists below are a sampling of online resources including practical advice, scholarly articles, and advanced analysis techniques. Feel free to add others in the comments.
SIS Whitepapers and Resources
A number of companies with expertise in SIS provide free educational resources on their company websites. These are generally less scholarly and practical advice on implementation of SIS.
- AESolutions Articles / Blog
- Control Engineering / SIS Articles
- Control Global / SIS Articles / Bill Mostia Articles
- eFunctionalSafety / Blog
- Emerson Exchange 365 SIS Blog
- Exida Whitepapers / Blog / Webinars
- ICEweb SIS Page
- Kenexis Papers / Videos
- PrimaTech Technical Materials / Blog
- Process Improvement Institute Resources
- SIS-Tech Publications
- ISA Webinars / Safety ListServ
- LinkedIn Safety Integrity Level Group
Articles from SINTEF and NTNU
The folks at SINTEF and NTNU do some of the best SIS and reliability analysis in the petroleum and process industries. Many of these are scholarly articles, but still very practical and applicable to industry.
- Common Cause Failures in Safety-Instrumented Systems: Using Field Experience from the Petroleum Industry
- Uncertainty assessment of reliability estimates for safety instrumented systems
- Guidelines for follow-up of Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) in the operating phase
- Updating failure rates and test intervals in the operational phase: A practical implementation of IEC 61511 and IEC 61508
- Operational data-driven prediction for failure rates of equipment in safety instrumented systems: A case study from the oil and gas industry
- more…
Other Notable Articles and Whitepapers
- Improvement in reliability quantification to support BS EN 61511 failure probability analysis
- A New Approach to SIL Verification
- Reassessing Failure Rates
- Why a run-to-fail strategy is not good practice for SIS?
Nuclear Regulatory Commission Documents
If there is a question about safety systems or reliability, chances are the nuclear industry has already asked it. These reports and papers are a treasure trove of data and analysis, but can be highly technical.
- NUREG 6823 - Handbook of Parameter Estimation for Probabilistic Risk Assessment
- NUREG 5485 Guidelines on Modeling Common Cause Failures in Probabilistic Risk Assessment
- NUREG 5700 - Aging Assessment of Reactor Instrumentation and Protection System Components
- more…
I hope this list is helpful. Please also check out the books and other resources in the store.