Application of Interactive Cause and Effect Diagrams to Safety-Related PES in Industrial Automation

Abstract

Safety requirements have a high impact on current industrial applications. Companies are liable by law for injuries to health and environmental hazards. Today international standards exist to prove for hazard avoidance. A decisive part of safe industrial applications is the software running a Programmable Electronic System. Programmable systems cannot be certified in general, so a time-consuming certification process has to be re-initiated during each commissioning. Hence, there is a strong need for easy-to-use tools, which not only simplify the application development, but do also support the certification process by modelling and presenting the system’s behaviour in an easily accessible way. We present a methodically diverse approach combining both, safety-related and standard requirements, within a single application. We apply the documentation technique of “Cause & Effect Diagrams” to a software tool. This allows developing efficiently safety-related applications up to Safety SIL 3 [2].