Report Digitalization of functional safety for Industrie 4.0 and Intelligent Manufacturing

We proudly present the new white paper, "Digitalization of functional safety for Industrie 4.0 and Intelligent Manufacturing", which details a crucial shift in industrial practice. Prepared by the Technical Expert Group Functional Safety & Predictive Maintenance, this document explores the critical intersection of functional safety and digitalization, driven by the need to make safety handling more cost-effective and flexible while maintaining targeted risk reductions.

Key Insights from the White Paper

The paper addresses the challenges of current manual and paper-based functional safety processes and outlines a vision for a digitalized approach:

• The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) proposes an interoperable and standardized information model for representing assets—physical, digital, and intangible. This model is foundational to creating a digital twin, which ensures functional safety by enabling automated, real-time interaction and simulation with the actual physical system.
• Digitalized Safety Design & Engineering: This approach revolutionizes the design phase by using AI to automate analysis, perform Digitalized Hazard and Risk Analysis (HARA), identify inconsistencies, and auto-generate Safety Requirement Specifications (SRS). Furthermore, Digitalized Safety Instrumented Function (SIF) Implementation streamlines application development, allowing for automated and flexible testing.
• Enhanced Operation and Maintenance: digitalization offers the optimization of safety function maintenance through objective safety indicators via dashboards, leveraging consolidated data and supports automated proof testing and predictive maintenance.
• Safety and Security: The critical concept is "There is no functional safety without security," emphasizing the need to cover all lifecycle phases and address challenges in aligning international standards (like IEC 62443) with regional legislation.

The process of digitalization in functional safety is seen as unstoppable. Implementing digitalized workflows will deliver significant benefits by improving the reliability of safety solutions, making processes more resilient to human errors, and ultimately reducing costs across the industrial sector.