FUNCTIONAL SAFETY CONSULTANCY

Independent functional safety assessments

Functional Safety Assessment (FSA) is a systematic review broken down into 5 stages (Stage 1 after initial Safety Requirements Specification (SRS) development, Stage 2 after detailed design, Stage 3 after installation and commissioning prior to hazards been introduce, stage 4 after gaining to operations and maintenance and stage 5 after modification or decommissioning) of all Safety Instrument Functions (SIFs).

Safety requirements specification development

The Safety Requirements Specification (SRS) is fundamental to the design and validation of the safety instrumented system. The SRS is developed during phase 3 of the Functional Safety lifecycle and must be available throughout the lifecycle. The SRS specifies the integrity and functional requirements for each Safety Instrument Function (SIF) required to achieve the target risk reduction.

Functional safety management services

These are the systems used by an organization to manage its activities to ensure that their functional safety objectives are accomplished.

The objective of having a compliant functional safety management system is to ensure that all aspects from process hazard and risk assessments to decommissioning of the SIS are managed.

This is to ensure continuity and suitable and sufficient process are applied throughout the lifecycle to engineer, install, operate and maintain the system so it is functionally safe and minimize potential systematic errors resulting in undesired events.

Functional Safety Gap Analysis

A Functional Safety Gap Analysis is the systematic review of a the organisations/projects systems identifying potential gaps in the system that can illustrate where additional work is required to assist in compliance to IEC 61508/61511.

Functional Safety Compliance Assessment

Functional Safety Compliance Assessment (FSCA) is a systematic review of a component or system to determine its overall SIL capability based on the requirements of BS EN IEC 61508 2nd Edition.

Systematic Capability Assessment

Functional Safety Systematic Capability Assessment (FSSCA) is a systematic review of a component or system to determine its overall systematic capability based on the requirements of BS EN IEC 61508 2nd Edition.

Lifecycle Verification

Verification is the activity that confirms by analysis and/or testing that the required outputs satisfy the defined requirements for the appropriate lifecycle phases.

Hardware verification

As part of the detailed design phase (phase 4) you are required to design the Safety Instrumented System (SIS) in accordance with the Safety Requirements Specification (SRS) so that the Safety Integrity Level requirements (SIL) can be met.

Part of meeting these requirements is that the Hardware utilised must be able to operate and be maintained to meet the requirements of the pre-defined integrity for the determined risk reduction factor. However, it must be noted that a purely hardware calculation will not cover the systematic targets to allow for the SIL requirements to be met.

A rigorous set of inspections to ensure that the equipment used is the equipment that has been assessed, must be conducted to ensure that the hardware verification is accurate and suitable.