Functional Safety

Study Programmes

Mission Statement: Functional safety focusses on hazards and risks that can arise from machines, systems, vehicles and the likes. These hazards and risks are to be controlled and alleviated with the help of control measures consisting of hardware, software and mechatronic systems. Nowadays, electrical, electronic, mechanical and software-based systems are increasingly used, which are developed under the aspects of fault control and fault avoidance measures and models. Based on these models, the hardware and software in such systems must be designed in such a way that their failure probabilities meet the legal and normative requirements. This results in corresponding fault-tolerant systems that are characterized by self-diagnosis, redundancies and increased quality requirements. These systems are for example, used in emergency devices for production machines, temperature and overflow monitoring in process systems, airbag and brake systems in automobiles, technical medical systems and aerospace systems.

Content: 1. Definition of terms “hazards and risks”, safety vs security.
2. Identify and define safety goals
3. Basics of reliability considerations (e.g., redundancy, diversity, failure rate)
4. Fundamentals of metrics and characteristic values of functional safety terms (e.g., SIL, ASIL, PL, DC, HFT, MTTF, etc)
5. Software requirements management
6. Software quality management to avoid errors and faults in development process (e.g., V-Model)
7. Use and qualification of development tools for safe software systems
8. Coding guidelines and qualification of programming languages
9. Validation and verification methods
10. Basic fault avoiding techniques in system architectures

Learning Outcomes: Knowledge Broadening
In this module, the students receive a basic knowledge of control-technical safety systems, reliability considerations and software quality criteria and their special requirements for development. In particular, they know the processes of functionally safe software development for these systems.
Knowledge Deepening
The students get to know the design process and the tools for creating hardware and software for safe and reliable computer systems. They understand the concepts of SW quality assurance.
Instrumental Skills and Competences
The students can select and evaluate the tools and methods with which the design process for functionally safe systems is supported.
Communicative Skills and Competences
The students can define suitable safe systems for a given task, create a suitable software development concept and select the necessary methods for validation and verification. They proceed in a methodical and structured manner and use professional tools. They can use arguments to represent problems and their proposed solutions to experts.
Systemic Skills and Competences
The students who have successfully studied this module understand the basics of functional safety and its requirements for development and quality.

Expected Knowledge and/or Competences: Mathematics 1 and 2 (I or E/ME or comparable), Programming 1 and 2 (I or E/ME or comparable)

Concept of Study and Teaching

Workload Dozentengebunden
Std. Workload	Lehrtyp
30	Vorlesungen
30	Labore
2	Prüfungen
Workload Dozentenungebunden
Std. Workload	Lehrtyp
30	Prüfungsvorbereitung
28	Veranstaltungsvor-/-nachbereitung
20	Literaturstudium
10	Vor-/Nachbereitung der Labore

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