Aggregation and presentation of safety barrier status information

In the petroleum industry, there has been an increasing focus on barrier management to prevent major acci-dents, such as the Macondo well blowout in 2010. Awareness about the status of the safety barriers is one important aspect of risk management. For this purpose the use of a barrier status panel has become increas-ingly popular on oil & gas installations in Norway. The panel typically presents status of all identified bar-rier elements as traffic lights (red, yellow or green status). A number of methodological and practical ques-tions arise when designing such a barrier status panel. How to define indicators for the barrier elements? How to set traffic lights on a barrier element level based on the status of the indicators? How to aggregate and present element status information to the users? This paper discusses aggregation of barrier status in-formation and presents a specific method named the "criticality matrix approach"