Safety barriers: Research advances and new thoughts on theory, engineering and management

Safety barriers include physical and non-physical means in different industries for preventing the occurrences of hazardous events and mitigating the consequences in case they have occurred. After clarifying the relevant terminologies, this article reviews the literature in the domain of safety barriers in the recent decade, and categorizes these studies into barrier theory, barrier engineering and barrier management. Classifications of barriers, performance measures, modeling approaches and data-driven analysis for safety barriers are reviewed as parts of barrier theories. In the engineering section, the research advances are presented in accordance with design for reliability and safety, test and maintenance strategies, responses to dependent failures, and diagnosis and prognosis of degradations. Then, project and process management, human and organizational factors, and standardization and compliance management of safety barriers are summarized. Based on the review of literature, research perspectives on safety barriers for resilience, digital safety, security of barriers, utilizing data, and dealing with intelligence, are highlighted and potential challenges are mentioned. This study is therefore expected to be beneficial to the researchers of system and safety engineering, with systematically streamlining and innovatively categorizing the recent findings and insights. •This article reviews the literature on safety barriers in the categories of barrier theory, engineering and management.•Classifications, performance measures, modeling approaches and data-driven analysis are covered in barrier theories.•Design, test and maintenance strategies, dependency analysis, and diagnosis and prognosis are barrier engineering.•Project and process management, human and organizational factors, and standardization are in barrier management.•Perspectives on resilience, digital safety, security, data, and intelligence are highlighted and challenges are concluded.