Norm compliant development and documentation of safety related application software in manufacturing system engineering

Status:

completed 08/2013

Aims:

In the single European Market the construction and marketing of machines must take into consideration the machinery directive 2006/42/EG. Among others this directive requires the assessment of all hazards. If the resulting safeguards are realized by automatic control, the requirements of EN ISO 13849-1 "Safety of machinery - Safety related parts of control systems, Part 1: General principles for design" have to be taken into account. This is also valid for the software parts of the safety functions. The industry compliant software implementation of the requirements of the EN ISO 13849-1 is not clear in detail. Aim of this project was to contribute solving this problem. In particular industry compliant procedures should be investigated by using industrial examples and error sources will be discussed. Furthermore the results will be presented in a report for industry.

Activities/Methods:

The following activities/methods were applied:

• Cooperation with regional enterprises
• Development of laboratory examples
• Realization of the examples with more than one PLC-technology
• Assessment of the industrial acceptance
• Investigation of error effects
• Creation of a report for industry.

Results:

In this project two methods were developed. Discussions with industry members showed that one method is not proper for industrial applications. The second method (matrix-method) gave a positive resonance in numerous presentations. The matrix method shows one possibility for the industry compliant software implementation of the requirements of the EN ISO 13849-1. In preparation for an IFA-Report the matrix-method is described in detail and some examples are provided.

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