Experience with establishment of reusable and certifiable safety lifecycle model within ABB

Abstract

One basic requirement for a functional safety development project is to establish a SIL-compliant safety lifecycle model. For a company with a big family of safety-related products and a great number of development projects like ABB, it would be very time-consuming and cost-intensive for each safety development project to develop a safety lifecycle model. One approach for managing the corresponding costs and effort is to create a common lifecycle model that fulfills the SIL requirements and can be reused by safety-related projects. In this paper we are going to present such a common safety lifecycle model, its structure and components, and our experience on how to establish and apply it in safety-related product development projects. The paper analyzes the design constraints for the development of a common safety lifecycle model such as complexity, flexibility, simplicity, conformity and the safety integrity. It shows how these constraints drive the design of the safety lifecycle model to be developed. Our design concept, design considerations, development strategy, and our experience in establishing such a common safety lifecycle model will also be discussed in the paper. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.