Safety-barrier diagrams as a safety management tool

Nijs Jan Duijm

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2009, vol. 94, issue 2, 332-341

Abstract: Safety-barrier diagrams and “bow-tie†diagrams have become popular methods in risk analysis and safety management. This paper describes the syntax and principles for constructing consistent and valid safety-barrier diagrams. The latter's relation to other methods such as fault trees and Bayesian Networks is discussed. Important advantages of safety-barrier diagrams as compared to other graphical risk-analysis methods are, firstly, the relative simplicity that supports communication with non-expert stakeholders and, secondly, the focus on deliberately inserted safety systems that supports the management and maintenance of these systems. Safety-barrier diagrams provide a useful framework for an electronic data structure that integrates information from risk analysis with operational safety management.

Keywords: Safety barriers; Safety-barrier diagrams; Risk analysis; Safety management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832008001178
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:94:y:2009:i:2:p:332-341

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2008.03.031

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().