Want to improve your safety lifecycle and be more compliant with IEC 61508? Focus on the things that have the most benefit. Like what? What are some of these valuable things?
One of the major deficiencies I see while doing certification assessments is…
This is the next in a series of blogs and papers on the benefits of cyber certification. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. Certification provides you with the opportunity to work with an experienced cyber team here at exida, and the vast knowledge of cyber…
Understanding operator decision-making is a good first step in improving operator effectiveness. Operator decision-making depends on the person (their level of expertise) and the situation (how familiar). A popular behavioral model from Rasmussen proposes that operator response can be broken into three levels; skill-based behavior, rule-based behavior, and knowledge-based behavior as shown in…
It’s interesting that I had been preparing a webinar on pipeline safety and security since there have already been numerous incidents reported regarding pipeline accidents and leakage. Now the latest incident concerning Colonial Pipeline and the ransomware attack by Darkside, a so-called extortion group,…
No, you probably don’t want to hurt me. But if your product is used in a safety application, and my job depends on your product doing its job, will it hurt me if it fails?
With so many of us doing more things differently during the COVID pandemic, I wonder if…
According to numerous industry studies, significant improvement has been made over the last 20 -30 years in occupational safety, but not so much in operational safety (process safety). New process safety incidents continue to occur that bear a striking resemblance to previous incidents. This means we are not effectively learning…
The term SIL is rapidly spreading to Request for Proposals (RFP) and purchase requirements in many industries. But in many of those industries, few have heard about SIL and fewer have a grasp of the fundamental concepts of SIL. SIL is a term that means Safety Integrity Level. It is used…
This is a topic which comes up time and again, especially when reviewing legacy systems. Although IEC61511 doesn’t preclude the use of shared devices, it does however provide guidance under Clause 11 of what the constraints are. Even though the Safety Instrumented System (SIS) and Basic Process Control System (BPCS)…
Insurance Companies are hedging their bets through premiums while the Manufacturing Industry is placing their wagers on luck.
The worlds of gambling and insurance are similar in many ways. Both are built upon elements of probability, modeling and quantification of risk. Professional gamblers are well informed on the odds…
The Oldsmar Water Treatment Facility in Pinellas County Florida was compromised by hackers on February 5th. Hackers took advantage of the TeamViewer application that was still installed on the water facilities network to gain remote access1. The TeamViewer was originally installed to allow for status checks and troubleshooting of…
When we were doing safety system designs in the 1980s, there was no Windows, there was no TCP/IP, there was no in Ethernet. We had to write our own protocols to transmit data to our I/O and our controllers.
Fault-finding was always a challenge . What we ended up…
Successful alarm rationalization combines both art and science. From the scientific point of view, rationalization follows a systematic process that applies alarm management principles to determine whether an alarm is justified (needed) and to document its basis (cause, consequence, corrective action, time to respond) and settings (priority, setpoint) in…
The increasing global adoption of alarm management standards (ISA-18.2 and IEC 62682) is bringing the importance of alarm rationalization to the forefront. Rationalization is defined as the “process to review potential alarms using the principles of the alarm philosophy, to select alarms for design, and to document the rationale…
This is the next in a series of blogs and papers on the benefits of cyber certification. You can read part 1 here. Certification provides you with the opportunity to work with an experienced cyber team here at exida, and the vast knowledge of cyber experts worldwide codified in…
The March / April 2020 issue of Intech contains an excellent article by Nick Sands and Donald Dunn, the co-chairs for the ISA-18 committee.
The article reviews some of the most frequently asked questions on alarm management: