Integrated functional safety management for software to achieve functional safety throughout the lifecycle phases

The concept of Functional Safety Management (FSM) has been around and in use for many years and then formalised and accepted globally with the issue of IEC61508 some ten years ago. The data collection required along with identification of activities throughout the safety lifecycle and the. Management and control of FSM as the project progresses can be a little daunting. Who shall manage and control this layer of management, is it the individual or is it a team effort? We may all be clear about the activities we must undertake as engineers but in a project team who takes responsibility for which FSM activities and how is this hierarchy conveyed and understood by the rest of the team? On a following project with some changes to the team, can a high level of repeatability be maintained, or is it back to square one? If the organisation and resource along with the safety lifecycle phases and ultimately the overall safety plan can be defined in a graphical environment, the overall picture of lifecycle phases, responsibilities and when FSM activities must be undertaken becomes clear immediately. Furthermore, because we are now using an electronic medium to capture this information we can explore other possibilities, like; access control, automatic reporting and remote review and approval. This paper discusses the merits of integrating in a graphical format the functional safety management aspects of IEC 61511 related to the conventional engineering practices of safety system lifecycle activities.