ABB Engineering Services has secured a new five-year agreement to supply its Trip Requirement and Availability Calculator (Trac) software globally to the BP group of companies.

Following an evaluation exercise, BP selected Trac due to the “flexibility of the software to meet both project and operational requirements and provide  service support and the ability of ABB to tailor the software to BP’s new company standards” says John Langley, senior control and instrumentation engineer of the BP Exploration & Production Technology Group,  Sunbury-on-Thames, London.
Mervyn Currie, BP exploration and production senior advisor said “Projects and operations across the BP Group will be encouraged to use Trac as the recommended SIL determination and reliability assessment tool.”
Trac was developed by ABB Engineering Services in 2002.  The original agreement between the two companies ended in 2006 and therefore BP decided to evaluate the other tools available in the market place, to ensure that their ongoing IEC61511 compliance needs would be supported by the most appropriate software tool. The evaluation process did identify that some improvements was required in Trac as well as changes to meet BP’s new company standards.
The Trac software tool is an efficiency and recording tool developed to help users towards compliance to international standards IEC61508 and IEC61511. It allows the user to determine the required Safety Integrity Level (SIL) for a Safety Function using IEC risk graph and LOPA (Layer of Protective Analysis) methodologies for safety, environmental or asset/production losses.
Trac allows the user to determine the optimum design of field hardware (input sensors, logic solver and output elements) configuration for safety instrumented functions to meet the required IL and also to verify that existing safety functions meet the required IL. It provides a methodology to calculate the optimum test intervals for safety functions to ensure that the required IL is met, taking into account production issues and projected annualised costs.
Trac has a client server architecture. As well as the improvements in the Trac software, ABB is currently developing a web presence for Trac.