On a Hazard Identification Method Based on Functional Safety and SysML

Abstract

The rapid growth of complexity and scale can be witnessed in the design and development of modern systems. As such, the severity of damages in the occasional accidents has attracted great deal of attention lately. Although a variety of methods have so far been studied to overcome or reduce the disastrous results of hazards, the issues seem still persistent and even complicated due to the situation mentioned above. The concept of functional safety has been regarded as one approach to handling the matters by shifting up to the functions level from the consideration of each physical component itself. The outcomes of those efforts would be the international standards on functional safety such as IEC 61508 and its relatives including IEC 62278, EN 50128, ISO26262, and so on. In this paper, a method of how hazards can be analyzed to be coped with those standards has been studied. In the method proposed, the systems modeling language (SysML) is playing a key role to model and analyze the hazards from the viewpoint of functional safety. The approach taken has been applied in the analysis of the hazards in railroad systems. In spite of focusing on the individual components hazards, the method based on functional safety has analyzed them collectively with the added effect of identifying the cause originated from the interface between the functions.