Safety barriers against common cause failure and cascading failure: literature reviews and modeling strategies

Abstract

Safety barriers are required in many technical systems to reduce initiating negations, suppress failure propagations, or mitigate the consequences of common cause failures and cascading failures. Based on a thorough literature review, this paper explores the functions of safety barriers within an extended bow-tie model. The safety barriers to prevent common cause failures are important to eliminate the coupling effects on multiple components simultaneously, whereas the safety barriers against cascading failures are functional with stopping or alleviating the failure propagation by intervening coupling paths. Then, an illustrative example is introduced to demonstrate the how such two types of safety barriers are modeled and how their effects are evaluated.