Functional Safety Consulting

Functional safety, reliability and compliance for your Safety Instrumented System (SIS)

The most industrial processes today rely on functional safety, a framework of Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS), to prevent hazardous scenarios for people, environment and facilities. We deploy a range of tools to assess these overall functional safety of your Safety Instrumented System, using different methodologies to identify the hazards, determine the Safety Integrity Levels for your safety instrumented systems and to perform the SIL Verification as part of the SIS design.

International standards such as IEC 61508 and IEC 61511 define functional safety requirements for electronic systems and industrial applications in an effort to ensure that organizations maintain robust protections for all their processes.

With our functional safety consulting services, we carry out Functional Safety Assessments (FSA) to ensure that your SIS includes the required Safety Instrumented Functions (SIFs) and that these are effective and reliable and maintain the required Safety Integrity Levels (SILs) through all the Safety Lifecycle. Our experts are knowledgeable and experienced in evaluating systems based on relevant international standards and thrive on collaboration with your team to improve your organization’s overall functional safety.

Your Benefits

Experienced support for all the activities involved in the Safety Lifecycle: analysis, implementation and operation.
A fail-safe functional safety system.
Compliance with international standards IEC61511 and IEC61508.
In-depth knowledge of your SIS and the functional safety management.

Our Approach

Our approach is guided by the knowledge that, while standards may be universal, each organization is unique. With this in mind, we develop customized assessment procedures for our clients defining the scope of the assessment, the assessors, participants of the FSA team, the planning of the FSA and the information that will be generated as a result of the FSA activity. According to this specially designed procedure:

The FSA team reviews the work carried out in all phases of the safety life cycle.
Each FSA stage relies upon a different set of input documentation and assessment items to determine the acceptability of the SIS. FSA will be performed with detailed checklists or other support tools designed for the use of the assessor.
The FSA is completed after all equipment is installed and the SIS operation is validated, but before the startup of the process equipment under protection. In addition, SIS functional defects found during the assessment must also be resolved, or adequately managed compensating measures put in place, prior to startup.
The results of the FSA will be available in a report with the recommendations coming from the assessment.

Our experts base their assessments on the guidelines provided by international standards such as IEC 61508/61511 to determine the required reliability of Safety Instrumented Functions (SIFs) and to ensure that SIFs are designed and operated correctly. These guidelines include the following:

To determine the SIL for each SIF, several semi quantitative methodologies can be used. A risk-based review of the protection systems using Layers Of Protection Analysis (LOPA) or a Risk Graph methodology is recommended. The SIL is determined based on the semi-quantitative estimation of the frequency of the initiating event, and the severity of the hazardous scenario, as well as the effective Independent Protection Layers (IPLs).

A SIL verification assessment is typically carried out after a SIL determination study to review if the design of the SIF achieves the safety requirements and the required SIL. During this phase, the technology and architecture are defined and it requires a calculation of the SIL.
The evaluation of a SIF involves the analysis of the reliability and the architecture of the SIS according to the standards.

Validation procedures should provide assurance that the safety requirements specifications of the SIS have been met and that any recommendations from earlier verification activities and reviews have been satisfactorily addressed.

Why DEKRA?

We are independent, third party functional safety experts.
We have international experience helping companies comply with functional safety standards.
We are specialists in functional safety consulting and your trusted advisors.