IEC 61508: Introduction to Functional Safety

Overview

The course will give you a one day introduction to functional safety of programmable electronic systems. It covers the basics concepts of functional safety from the perspective of the IEC 61508 series of standards.

Goal/Benefits

The goal of the course is to provide an understanding of challenges in developing safety critical systems compliant to the IEC 61508. The course will enable the participants to assess the impact of initiating and executing functional safety projects on their organization.

Audience/Participants

The course is intended as introduction on functional safety to R&D managers or senior R&D engineers who need to understand the key issues in developing or subcontracting a safety critical system.  The course is domain independent and applicable to all domains where the IEC 61508 standard is applied or has a strong influence such as heavy machinery, railways and process industry.

Previous / Knowledge

Generic knowledge of the basic concepts of system design (HW and SW), testing and validation is expected. In-depth knowledge is not required as the examples presented are at a conceptual level.

Content

The training aims at covering all key concepts in the IEC 61508 series of standards. Areas which will be covered  are:

• General background on functional safety and the IEC 61508 standards.
• Key concepts of functional safety.
• Management of functional safety.
• Functional safety assessment.
• Design of safety critical systems according to the IEC 61508

Agenda

• Functional safety and standards.
• Description of important terminology and definitions
• Introduction to IEC 61508.
• Description of the overall safety life cycle.
• Management of functional safety assessment.
• Functional safety assessment.
• Description of IEC 61508-2 (system/hardware).
• Description of IEC 61508-3 (software).
• Summary

Instructor

Johan Hedberg, Functional safety engineer at, SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden.

• Master of Science in Electronics, 1999, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
• Focused on assessment and certification of safety critical control systems.
• Technical evaluations and research projects at SP from 1999.
• Project manager, evaluator, assessor.
• Example standards IEC 61508, ISO 13849-1, IEC 62061, IEC 61511, ISO 26262