A GLOBAL APPROACH THROUGHOUT ALL PHASES OF THE PRODUCT’S LIFE
Functional safety is about detecting potentially dangerous conditions and activating a protective or corrective mechanism to either prevent hazardous event arising or mitigate the consequences of the hazardous event”. To achieve this goal, Functional Safety also relies on reliability, maintainability and availability.
The functional safety approach allows products to be placed on the market with controlled risks, limiting failures of safety-critical functions that may cause serious injury or death to people.
With the advent of autonomous vehicles and the expected increasing complexity of electronic subsystems that execute ever more complex software, there will be a growing need to improve electronically controlled safety-critical functions, especially to reduce system downtime and achieve fail-functional capabilities. Safety integrity levels equivalent to (SIL) 2 and 3 are now the most common levels required by off-highway applications.
ACTIA handles functional safety analysis using a global approach throughout all phases of the product’s life, from design to the end of the product’s life-cycle. This comprehensive approach is carried out both at technological system level, and is now including cybersecurity features.
As part of its functional safety approach, ACTIA :
- Reduces the introduction of development faults in the design of the system, hardware and software,
- Analyses all hardware failures and uses technical measures to mitigate those that are unacceptable,
- Examines manufacturing process failures and implements measures to detect the deviation zone in this process,
- Monitors failures of products in service.
When experience leads to a positive frame of mind
FUNCTIONAL SAFETY HAS ITS DEDICATED TEAM !
At ACTIA, Functional Safety is a collaborative multidisciplinary task supervised by the Project Safety Manager. The Project Safety Manager is required to direct, supervise, monitor and commission RAMS (Reliability – Availability – Maintainability – Safety) studies for products, together with the development team. He identifies and documents the parts relating to dependability and does so in accordance with the automotive functional safety standards.
The Project Safety Manager guarantees that the architecture and product development comply with the standards. He is involved right from the stage at which the product architecture is defined and sets the guidelines that must be followed and the constraints that must be respected
The missions of the functional safety team for dedicated or off-the-shelf products
- Enhance the company’s processes, methods and tools to improve the overall implementation of functional safety,
- Assist the customer in defining safety objectives and requirements throughout the duration of the project,
- Manage the development of products according to the current safety standard.
- Help to define the safety architecture within the products (telematics, I/O controllers, drive train, HMI, etc.),
- Conduct safety analysis, audits and assessments,
- Manage product certification according to the safety standards (ISO 26262, ISO 13849, ISO 25119)
COMPLEX FUNCTIONAL SAFETY STANDARDS NEED A POWERFUL MANAGEMENT TOOL
ACTIA has developed its own risk analysis tool that concatenate three analyses in a single tool.
- DFMEA,
- FMEDA (Failure Modes, Effects and Diagnostic Analysis): ISO 26262, ISO 13849 and ISO 25119 metrics,
- DFA (Dependant Fault Analysis: Analysis of common failure modes).
This time-saving risk analysis tool ensures overall consistency and allow to quickly determine whether the level of functional safety of the product is sufficient or not.
When the level is not considered sufficient, the tool also allows to:
- Target the key contributors responsible for “non-safety”,
- Understand the causes of the risk: complexity, lack of testing, lack of diagnostics, poor reliability, etc,
- Implement actions, be it assurance actions (tests, analysis, etc.) or technical measures (additional diagnostics),
- Help to formally decide on the propensity of a product to be safe for our customers, and thus the users of the product.
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