It's not just the activities performed by the operators or the malfunctioning of a machine that can cause risks for physical health: even the Software and Hardware Systems have a degree of incidence, and it is measured with technical parameters.

Lo international standard IEC/EN 61508 is widely accepted as the basis for the specification, design and general operation of a Safe Instrument System – Safety Instrumented System (SIS).

As a basic standard, IEC/EN 61508 uses a formulation based on risk assessment: once this risk assessment has been carried out and through a procedure for its reduction/mitigation, the necessary SIL Safety Integrity Level (SIL) for those components and systems with functions that impact the physical safety of people and the environment.

SIL (Safety Integrity Level): DOWNLOAD THE WHITE PAPER FOR FREE!

As clearly indicated, the evaluation is carried out on the functionality of a system and therefore is not solely oriented towards the probability of a device breaking (e.g. an electronic device can be perfectly active but respond "functionally" incorrectly to an external stress).

The SIL assessment of components and systems is therefore intended to reduce the risk associated with a system or a device up to a "tolerable risk" level.

System Downtime of supervision or the its malfunction are therefore factors that more or less directly can cause accidents: so what can be done to obtain an application that is at least SIL1 (or better still SIL2)?

First of all, the choice for the control and supervision systems of SW solutions that are consolidated and market standard: only by introducing stable and solid (always on) software platforms into the process can one speak of a "safe application", but that is not enough.

SIL (Safety Integrity Level): DOWNLOAD THE WHITE PAPER FOR FREE!

The techniques (or rather technologies) to reach the highest levels of SAFETY they must also be looked for in the "container" in which these applications run: the REDUNDANCY, should not be understood only on physical systems (double socket, UPS, etc ...), but should be considered fundamental for the software part.

The SCADA systems themselves all have more or less stable solutions for having applications running in parallel, proposing hot or cold backup systems, with different downtime reaction capabilities.

System virtualization of supervision has also created other increasingly performing methods to increase the AVAILABILITY': ServiTecno has been offering the solution STRATUS EVERUN ENTERPRISE, able to create so-called “five-nine” solutions, i.e. that they are UP 99,999% of the time.

How STRATUS works? Find out why banks and finance systems were the first to increase the availability of systems with EVERUN ENTERPRISE.

These speeches in 2016 are valid for any application, but it goes without saying that in critical infrastructure (transport, energy, utilities), control and supervision systems are crucial in complex functional processes and can therefore represent elements of risk. In this sense, an assessment of the impact that these systems can have on safety can and must be carried out.

 

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