This article presents a practical approach to reliability assessment of a complex safety instrumented system that is susceptible to common cause failures. The approach is based on fault tree analysis where the common cause failures are included by post-processing the minimal cut sets. The approach is illustrated by a case study of a safety instrumented function of a workover control system that is used during maintenance interventions into subsea oil and gas wells. The case study shows that the approach is well suited for identifying potential failures in complex systems and for including design engineers in the verification of the reliability analyses. Unlike many software tools for fault tree analysis, the approach gives conservative estimates for reliability. The suggested approach represents a useful extension to current reliability analysis methods.
