Functional safety certification: Practice and issues

As the increasing use of programmable electronic systems to carry out safety functions of automation control systems, there is an emerging need for functional safety certification in order to protect people, equipment and work in progress (WIP) from injuries and damages. The current practice of functional safety certification and other existing control logic verification methods that could be used for functional safety certification are compared, and issues are identified. With that, a new approach and the associated technical challenges for its implementation are discussed. It aims to improve the certification process by significantly reducing setup cost, saving certification time, and improving certification quality. The paper concludes with a future research plan for solving identified challenges.