Over the past 25 years there have been a number of initiatives worldwide to develop guidelines and standards to enable the safe exploitation of programmable electronic systems (PESs) used for safety applications. In the context of industrial applications (to distinguish from aerospace and military applications) a major initiative has been focussed on IEC 61508, and other standards based on IEC 61508, have emerged as a key international standards.
This paper considers some of the key features of IEC 61508, which has now been available for over 10 years, and indicates some of the issues that are being considered in the current revision of the standard.
Reproduced under the terms of the Click-Use License. May 2009
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Chairman IEC 61508-1/2; email: ronbell@dsl.pipex.com. The paper is an updated version of a paper by the Health & Safety Executive, UK (Author; BellRon) 2005.
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Health and Safety Executive (1995): “Out of Control (why control systems go wrong and how to prevent failure)”. HSE Books 2003. ISBN 0 7176 2192 8. <www.hsebooks.co.uk>
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IEC 62280-2 (2002–10) Ed. 1.0 Railway applications - Communication, signalling and processing systems - Part 2: Safety-related communication in open transmission systems
