The Importance of Single-Source Engineering of Emergency and Process Shutdown Systems

Abstract

Emergency/Process ShutDown systems (ESD/PSD) involve large numbers of signals, span many process units and have strict compliance requirements. These factors increase the burden of engineering, operation and reporting, and drive the search for techniques such as Cause & Effect Matrix (CEM). By showing input signals as matrix rows and outputs as columns, CEM provides an intuitive view of shutdown trip logic and is now common practice in industry. This popularity has contributed to problems of data duplication and transcription errors when multiple incarnations of the same CEM are used at different lifecycle stages. Process engineers, programmers, operators and safety managers each view the same CEM recreated in different formats.

The authors show how the CEM paradigm can benefit from a standardised syntax and visual representation so that all the different views of a CEM are based on the same underlying data, increasing safety and productivity throughout the lifecycle.