Testing compliance to functional safety requirements

Functional safety of fieldbuses - what is it?

Functional safety requirements cover the overall safety of industrial machinery and processes. Complying to safety requirements is mandated by EU directives and the detailed standards are defined by standardization bodies such as ISO.  As an increasing number of the equipment is automated, safety related to data errors is an important part of the overall safety.

Automated equipment or systems are managed by data inputs, transmitted in fieldbuses, and over industrial ethernet. However, any data is prone to errors arising from human errors, equipment failures, or problems in data transmission.

It is extremely important to know how machinery operates when these errors happen. In real life, mistakes and errors happen despite the best precautions. We can offer the equipment to support your safety testing needs.

Real-life challenges, defined by standards

The standard ISO 13849, Safety of machinery, defines the requirements for fault injection tests that are needed to validate the safety of the equipment under test. The details of the failures arise from the standard IEC 61784-3, Fieldbus safety.

Real-life data transmission faces many challenges. The data may be delayed or lost entirely. The data may be flawed in one way or another. Regardless of the errors in data, it is important that the equipment will function safely.

This can be determined by injecting those failures in the data and observing how the system responds to them. The faults can be repeatably injected using a network emulator.

Testing fieldbus safety with network emulator Rude

Network emulator Rude was built to create accurate and repeatable errors in IP traffic in real-time. While the tool was initially built to support telecom engineers, the same needs for repeatable testing exist in any IP-based data transmission in an industrial environment.

The tool supports functional safety testing by creating the needed fault scenarios, allowing you to create the test cases needed and evaluate the results. Let’s discuss how we can help you meet your safety goals.