Functional Safety

11B1265

Bachelor

German, English

5.0

irregular

1 semester

Functional safety focusses on hazards and risks that can arise from machines, systems, vehicles and the likes. These hazards and risks are to be controlled and alleviated with the help of control measures consisting of hardware, software and mechatronic systems. Nowadays, electrical, electronic, mechanical and software-based systems are increasingly used, which are developed under the aspects of fault control and fault avoidance measures and models. Based on these models, the hardware and software in such systems must be designed in such a way that their failure probabilities meet the legal and normative requirements. This results in corresponding fault-tolerant systems that are characterized by self-diagnosis, redundancies and increased quality requirements. These systems are for example, used in emergency devices for production machines, temperature and overflow monitoring in process systems, airbag and brake systems in automobiles, technical medical systems and aerospace systems.

1. Definition of terms “hazards and risks”, safety vs security.
2. Identify and define safety goals
3. Basics of reliability considerations (e.g., redundancy, diversity, failure rate)
4. Fundamentals of metrics and characteristic values of functional safety terms (e.g., SIL, ASIL, PL, DC, HFT, MTTF, etc)
5. Software requirements management
6. Software quality management to avoid errors and faults in development process (e.g., V-Model)
7. Use and qualification of development tools for safe software systems
8. Coding guidelines and qualification of programming languages
9. Validation and verification methods
10. Basic fault avoiding techniques in system architectures

The total workload for the module is 150 hours (see also "ECTS credit points and grading").

• Written examination or
• Project Report, written

• Field work / Experimental work

Choosen by Lecturer

In the case of a written examination, a duration of 2 hours is expected. In case of a written project report fulfilling project requirements, a report of 10-15 pages is expected. 

Knowledge of engineering mathematics or mathematics for computer science.

Procedural and object-oriented programming in C/C++.

In this module, the students receive a basic knowledge of control-technical safety systems, reliability considerations and software quality criteria and their special requirements for development. In particular, they know the processes of functionally safe software development for these systems.

The students get to know the design process and the tools for creating hardware and software for safe and reliable computer systems. They understand the concepts of SW quality assurance.

Students who have successfully completed this module understand the basics of functional safety and its requirements for development and quality standards.

The students will be able to apply the knowledge gained in the module and interpret the applicability of functional safety standards on real-life problems. They will be able to independently make scientifically sound judgements and assessments for practical scenarios.

The students will be able to comprehensively communicate, plan and cooperate among team members effectively for building a multidisciplinary project pertaining to various areas of functional safety, such as hardware, software and verification and validation. 

• Wübbelmann, Jürgen

• Iyenghar, Padma