The International Electrotechnical Commission is the organisation which develops and sets international standards in electrotechnical engineering areas. In 1997 the IEC published the standard IEC 61508, Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems. The phrase “electrical/electronic/programmable electronic” is cumbersome and is often shortened to E/E/...

Le jeu "SIL Facile" sur les niveaux de SIL ─ abréviation anglo-saxonne pour Safety Integrity Level a été proposé dans le cadre d’une pédagogie active en école d’ingénieurs la sécurité fonctionnelle et maîtrise des risques. L’idée ce serious game est modéliser processus défaillances d’un système instrumenté utilisant un lancer dé tirage cartes portant instants défaillance. Ce objectif d’illustre...

Dieses Papier berichtet über Arbeiten im Rahmen des Projektes SAMS, in welchem eine Fahrwegsicherungskomponente für Serviceroboter und fahrerlose Transportsysteme entwickelt und ihre Software nach IEC 61508 zertifiziert wird. Neu ist hierbei der durchgehende Einsatz formaler Modellierung und Beweis als Mittel zur Zertifizierung, das es uns erlaubt, die erforderlichen Sicherheitsbedingungen sehr...

In 2010, the author was approached with a query from industry concerning the application of IEC 61508-7:2010 Annex D, on the statistical evaluation of software. We realised that Annex D is not a helpful guide for a number of reasons. We discuss some common assessment scenarios and their quandaries and requirements for the application of statistical methods based on Bernoulli/Poisson mathematics.

Computer technology has the potential to significantly reduce the risks associated with scenery motion in live theatre, as well as enhancing the spectacle of performance. The industry is becoming more concerned about safety standards compliance. IEC 61508 is emerging as the universally favoured standard for functional safety of stage machinery control systems.

To enable the description of safety-related software, the Unified Modeling Language is provided with well proven constructs as found, e.g., in corresponding subsets of the real-time programming language PEARL and in Function Block Diagrams according to IEC 61131-3. These constructs are ordered in nested sets to fulfill the respective requirements of the four Safety Integrity Levels of IEC 61508...

The IEC 61508 standard recognizes the programming languages defined in IEC 61131-3 as being appropriate for safety-related applications, and suggests the use of static analysis techniques to find errors in the source code. In this context, we have added a semantic verification stage to the MatIEC compiler an open source ST, IL and SFC code translator to ANSI C. In so doing, we have identified s...

The development of a generic international standard on achieving safety of systems based on programmable electronics has been in train for several years. A draft, published in 1995 and referred to as 'IEC 1508', presented the principles embodied in the document, with the result that they began to be influential in sector-specific standards and on the way of thinking about safety. Now IEC 61508,...

1. Summary ..........................................................................................................................1 2. Introduction to the problem...............................................................................................2 3. IEC 61508 and IEC/TS 61000-1-2...................................................................................3 4. Appropriate me...

Safety instrumented systems are installed to detect hazards and mitigate their consequences. Several international standards give requirements and guidance on how to design, operate and maintain such systems. Two relevant standards for safety instrumented systems in the process industry are the IEC 61508 and the IEC 61511. The two standards propose requirements related to how hardware architect...