Besides economic aspects, the safety of technical operating units is of supreme interest for plant operators. To protect people and the environment from accidents, automated safety systems are an essential part of many technical plants. They are subject to international standards and need to satisfy stringent requirements on availability. New methods for the description of safety systems can not only significantly reduce the efforts of quantitative performance evaluation, but also open up new possibilities for the optimization of maintenance activities of safety systems. 

Publications:

• D. Mikhaylenko, P. Zhang. Comparison of the approaches for PFD evaluation of safety instrumented systems with non-exponential distributions. Proceedings of the 2021 European Control Conference (ECC), pp. 1317-1322, 2021.
• A. Abdelkarim, P. Zhang. Optimal scheduling of preventive maintenance for safety instrumented systems based on mixed-integer programming. Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Model-Based Safety and Assessment (IMBSA 2020), pp. 83–96, 2020.
• S. Gau, T. Leifeld, P. Zhang: A Novel and Fast MPC Based Control Strategy for Switched Linear Systems Including Soft Switching Cost. Proceedings of the 56th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pp. 6513 - 6518, Melbourne, Australia, 2017.
• D. Martynova, P. Zhang. Optimization of maintenance schedule for safety instrumented systems. Proceedings of the 20th IFAC World Congress, pp. 12995-13000, Toulouse, France, 2017.
• T. Leifeld, J. Schlegel, P. Zhang. A new approach to the reliability analysis of safety instrumented systems. Automatisierungstechnik, Vol. 64, No. 6, pp. 457-466, 2016.

PhD Thesis:

• K. Machleidt: Preventive maintenance of Safety-related Systems - modeling, analysis, and optimization / Präventive Instandhaltung sicherheitsbezogener Systeme - Modellierung, Analyse und Optimierung. Shaker Verlag, Aachen, 2016, ISBN: 978-3-8440-4151-4.

Master Thesis:

• S. Aglikat: Cyber-Risikoanalyse für komplexe PLT-Schutzeinrichtungen in Industrieanlagen, 2020.

Bachelor Thesis:

• J. Hu: Reliability Analysis of Complex Industrial Safety Instrumented Systems, 2022.
• H. S. Ndayambaje Nkindi: Evaluation of AltaRica for Safety Analysis and Maintenance Scheduling, 2021.