After the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010, Petroleum Safety Authority Norway (PSA) called for better solutions for monitoring the status of safety barriers. In their memo ‘Principles for barrier management in the petroleum industry’ many of their ideas and expectations were described. In 2011, Presight Solutions built a flexible barrier monitor solution with the aim to meet all requirements and expectations from PSA and the industry. After the first release, the solution has constantly been improved based on input from PSA, the industry and our own improvements. Today, we are in main release 6 of our Presight Barrier Monitor solution.

Presight Barrier Monitor™ is a tool for barrier monitoring and visualization. The goal is that technical, organizational and operational barrier elements are maintained in an integrated and consistent manner in order to minimize operational risk. This tool continuously monitors technical, operational and organizational barriers and displays and communicates the status of the barrier functions related to planning, operating and maintaining the asset. This enable the user to take action to restore degraded barriers to prevent and mitigate unwanted events such as major accident hazards, harm to people, environment and down time. Presight Barrier Monitor™ automatically gathers information from different systems. Information is gathered from design documentation, such as bowties, barrier strategies and performance standards. In addition, data is automatically retrieved from the from maintenance systems, HR systems, deviation systems, inhibit logs, the permit to work systems, etc. direct from the source or via data lake. The information is structured to give an overview of the status of the barriers.

Presight Barrier Monitor™ is used for both decision making and to communicate barrier awareness. Use case examples are operational planning, management of inhibits, permit to work approvals, strategic planning, maintenance planning and prioritization and platform morning. A successful barrier management process with monitoring of barrier status that makes information easily accessible will ensure better HSEQ awareness across the organization, better overview of operational risk, more informed assessments and decisions and thus improved safety level.