Safety Applications of Programmable Electronic Systems in the Process Industry: Impact of Emerging Standards

Scope of the paper is to provide indications of today’s best practices on safety applications of computer based systems and the impact of emerging standards. Starting in the early 1970’s, the potential benefits and problems of such systems are recognised. Since then, standards and guidelines have been proposed to regulate the application of computer to perform safety functions. Among them all there is a common agreement that safety of critical systems can only be properly addressed in the overall system context. No single method can be considered sufficient to achieve the safety features required in many safety applications. Good safety engineering approach has to address not only hardware and software failures in isolation but also interface, management and operation sequence failures. The paper is intended to cover those aspects, which need to be addressed when programmable electronic systems are used to achieve functional safety within the process sector, with special attention to the cost and organisational impact of emerging standards.