Aggregation And Presentation Of Safety Barrier Status Information

In the petroleum industry, there has been an increasing focus on barrier management to prevent major accidents, such as the Macondowell blowout in 2010. Awareness about the status of the safety barriers is one important aspect of risk management. For this purpose the use of a barrier status panel has become increasingly popular on oil & gas installations in Norway. The panel typically presents status of all identified barrier elements as traffic lights (red, yellow or green status). A number of methodological and practical questions arise when designing such a barrier status panel. How to define indicators for the barrier elements? How to set traffic lights on a barrier element level based on the status of the indicators? How to aggregate and present element status information to the users? This paper discusses aggregation of barrier status information and presents a specific method named the "criticality matrix approach".