The handbook provides reliability data based on field feedback for components of safety instrumented systems, subsea and drilling equipment and selected non-instrumented safety critical equipment. Considerable effort has been made to ensure that the data are credible, traceable, documented and justified, in line with requirements in the IEC 61508 and IEC 61511 standards.

Compared to the 2013 edition of the handbook, the main changes are:

• Greatly expanded data basis, including comprehensive and more recent operational experience
• New equipment groups are added
• For several sensors and final elements, the failure rates differentiate between relevant attributes such as dimension, measuring principle, process service, etc.
• Updated values for the common cause factor (β factor), diagnostic coverage (DC) and random hardware fraction (RHF)
• Improved data traceability and a more datailed assessment of data uncertainty

An electronic version (in PDF-format) of selected pages from the "PDS Data Handbook" can be viewed here.