Functional Safety and Its Importance

 Functional Safety and Its Importance: A Point of View

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Functional safety is part of the overall safety of the system (machine or car) and individual components used in the system which is also expected to perform the function they were designed for. According to the Industrial Functional Safety Standard i.e. International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC 61508), it is defined as “Functional Safety is the part of the overall safety relating to the EUC (Equipment Under Control) and the EUC control system which depends on the correct functioning of the E/E/PE (electrical/electronic and programmable electronic) safety-related systems, other technology safety-related systems and external risk reduction facilities”. Functional safety has always existed. However, with more human-machine interactions and the implementation of autonomous technology into the machinery on our factory floors and cars, it has converted into a specialized technical field and is now an engineering discipline. Functional safety is all about safe machinery and vehicle performance, without causing any risks to human life.

Safety is like that of reliability, but in this case, it only considers failures that may produce safety hazards. Unlike reliability, all failures are not considered in safety attributes. However, in safety, failures are categorized as fail-safe or fail-unsafe. Safety can be expressed as, “the probability that the system either performs its function correctly or discontinues its operation in a fail-safe manner in the interval [0, t], given that the system was operating correctly at time 0”. Therefore, Safety is essential in critical applications where a failure could generate human injury, death, or environmental disaster.

Functional safety involves design techniques for safety-critical systems. In these techniques, systems are designed such that when a failure occurs in the systems, it tolerates the failure or stops the operation of the system safely. The study of faults, errors and failures is the main essence of functional safety. These approaches include fault-tolerant techniques, fault simulation techniques, and redundancy techniques. There are various architectures are also developed to achieve functional safety such as 1oo1, 1oo2, 1oo3, 2oo3 etc. This field comes under the domain of digital systems design.

 

Dr Abdul Rafay Khatri

Digital System Design Group.

Department of Electronic Engineering,

QUEST Nawabshah.