Early phase fault propagation analysis of safety critical factory automation systems

As the software intensiveness and complexity of safety critical factory automation systems increases, established safety analysis methods are unable to cope with risks arising from faults that propagate over subsystems and cross the domain boundaries between software, electronics and mechanics. To address this problem, an early simulation based safety analysis method is proposed. After the required functionality has been modeled, design alternatives are incorporated into the simulation. The analysis will identify those alternatives that compromise the functional safety of the application.