System Safety Concept for Machinery Systems

There are several new trends for moving machines that will affect also on the requirements for the safety and reliability of machines. Working machines will become more and more evidently a part of the production process. When the machines are remotely controlled and the machine control is developing towards machine fleet control and management, the focus on machine safety issues changes to system safety issues and the risk management of the whole operational environment. In future, automated, remote controlled and autonomously moving machines will no longer be stand-alone machines but rather are parts of the automated production systems and when developing those, the whole production process and operation environment have to be considered. There is a need for knowledge about how to specify system safety requirements and system reliability requirements for the unique machine application at different levels. There is also a need for new procedures on how to manage system safety and reliability risks through the whole life cycle of the system. The scope of this study has been to develop a generic concept and procedure for the safety risk management of automated working machine systems, which tends to take into account interactions between human, technology and environment when specifying safety requirements to the system and designing, implementing and maintaining safety solutions. Special attention has been paid to describing the risk management process, the needed methods and tools and information management. The developed "System Safety Concept" and safety requirement management is related to Systems engineering and the concept follows the System life cycle model and Risk assessment principles (IEC 60300-3-9, ISO 14121). The control and automation system parts comply with IEC 61508, ISO 13849 and IEC 62061 principles. As a result of this research, a data management tool for conducting HAZOP studies on the MS Access 2002 platform was developed from the viewpoint of the System Safety concept.