Dependability and Functional Safety: Applications in Industrial Electronics Systems

This article dealt with the topical subjects of the dependability and the functional safety of a system in light of the corpuses of dependability theory and functional safety standards. After some preliminary definitions on the notions of systems and service, the two corpuses were explicated. Concepts developed to give the matter an abstract but useful assessment were illustrated. The way issues treated by the two corpuses integrate with each other when dealing with a safety-critical system was also discussed. In the last section, the theoretical formulations were put into practice by focusing on the power inverter feeding the steering motor of an SbW system of a vehicle and on the ECU of the hoisting module of a passenger elevator.