Reliability Analysis of Wireless Safety-Instrumented Systems

Abstract

Progressive development of wireless technology in recent years has enabled it to span its application to a wide verity of systems. Simple house hold monitoring and monitoring of a patient in a hospital gives two diverse examples of these systems. Recently wireless sensor networks (WSN) are suggested as an alternative for safety monitoring subsystem in safety instrumented systems (SISs). SISs have an important role in safety barriers management where each SIS is assigned to one or more safety integrity functions (SIFs). The added wireless feature to the SISs may create uncertainties concerning their field performance. It is therefore necessary to develop methods to assess the reliability and safety integrity level (SIL) of SIFs in an adequate, sufficiently accurate and practical way.