First IEC Standards+ training courses on Functional Safety
“The challenge today is to design systems where dangerous failures are prevented, or, when they arise, are controlled.”
Functional safety
Safety is an inherent part of our daily life. Electrical, electronic or programmable electronic systems increasingly carry out safety functions. Dangerous failures can be caused by incorrect specifications: system, hardware or software. They might be due to random hardware failures, or human error, environmental influences such as temperature or electromagnetic or mechanical phenomena. They could come about because of loss or reduced voltage or re-connection of supply.
Because they are highly complex, it is difficult in practice to verify each failure mode or to test for all possible behaviour. It is difficult too to predict safety performance. The challenge today is to design systems where dangerous failures are prevented or, when they arise, are controlled.
The IEC 61508 series of Standards, Functional safety of electrical, electronic and programmable electronic (E/E/PE) safety-related systems is made up of eight parts. The publications deal with overall safety that is dependent on a system or equipment operating correctly in response to the inputs it receives.
The IEC set up its first Standards+ course on Functional Safety to provide participants with additional training on the fundamentals of the IEC 61508 which includes several key elements: the management of Functional Safety; the technical requirements for the systems engineering, the hardware and the software; the competence of persons (currently informative but will become normative); and the assessment of Functional Safety.
Participants at the first training session in Seoul, South Korea
Forty-three participants gathered in Seoul, South Korea, on 28 and 29 April 2009. Many of them were from testing laboratories; others were engineers from industrial conglomerates. Under their trainer Ron Bell, one of the world's leading experts in the field of Functional Safety, they worked together on a programme that covered risk management, risk assessment and risk reduction. Bell, a retired safety engineer from the UK's Health & Safety Executive, is one of the experts who helped write IEC 61508 and chairs one of the two Working Groups currently undertaking the revision of IEC 61508.
The second one-and-a-half-day course, held on 4 and 5 May in Singapore, proved to be highly interactive. As in the previous session, the 16 attendees were able to gain substantial insight on identifying and defining the performance requirements of control systems with an aim to ensure sufficiently low dangerous failure rates and achieve their target of tolerable risk.
"KATS (the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards), Spring and the Singapore National Committee of the IEC, were of tremendous help in setting up these courses. Not only did they help us in finding the ideal location, but thanks to their energetic and enthusiastic support, we were able to supply the Korean participants with a simultaneous translation of the entire course. Participants were very positive and we have a fine record of the event with them posing for the group photo with the diploma they received at the end of the course", said Guilaine Fournet, IEC Head of Sales and Business Development, and coordinator of the course.
"We're now working on setting up a second set of courses on Functional Safety to take place in South America at the end of 2009. We're also discussing the possibility of developing further courses on the practical application of standards in other areas such as EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility)."
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