Increase of Safety Awareness

摘要

The history of evolution of safety engineering at FREQUENTIS – a telecommunicationscompany with approximately 500 employees - started with reliability calculations (ReliabilityBlock Diagrams put into RAM Modeling and Prediction Reports), which are strongly safetyrelated for voice communication systems in air traffic control, and Failure Mode, Effects andCriticality Analyses. This evolution was, and still is, heavily driven by more and more stringentcustomer requirements due to the increasing complexity of the built systems.The next step was the creation of an internal hazard log, which was the first pure safetyactivity, followed by the unification of software quality management with safety engineering,which led to the first software safety activities (e.g. application of Def. Stan. 00-55, …).The integration of Independent Verification and Validation initiated the foundation of theSafety Support Group which now comprises additionally the Test Tool Development, theHardware Compliance, the Configuration Management and the Process Ownership for thedevelopment process.This way all Safety related engineering disciplines are combined in an independent departmentwith the reporting line directly to the management board.The implementation of the safety policy in the whole company is supported by internaltrainings (Reliability Engineering, System Safety, SW Quality Management with focus on SWSafety).To gain the necessary knowledge the safety specialists participate in external trainings (in theUSA and Great Britain) and safety conferences.A major problem, due to different business areas and customers around the world (withdissimilar national laws), are considerably varying requirements and expectations of safetyengineering which is partly reflected in the big number of standards which had to be taken intoaccount in time:DoD 2167, MIL-Std 498, IEEE 12207, Mil-Std 882c, IEC1508, IEC 61508, Def Stan 00-55,Def Stan 00-56, CENELEC 50126, 50128, 50129,…Those challenges lead to continuous improvement of the development process and to thedevelopment of various supporting tools (like the FHA worksheet as presented last year (ref.1)).The need for continuous improvement of safety activities is not only driven by the demand ofcustomers but also by intrinsic problems due to evolving technologies, developmentenvironments and an increasing linking and integration of both systems and people (developerand operators).The latest addition to the process is Safety monitoring for development projects which isimplemented mainly with the help of three types of meetings: The Safety Kick Off which leadsto the generation of an System Development Plan with the process tailored for this project,Monitoring Meetings to supervise the implementation of the planned tasks and the Close DownMeeting with discussion of lessons learned.The aim of Safety Monitoring is to assure compliance to the agreed processes, traceability,performance of safety reviews, achievement of project milestones in time and that way riskreduction. This is reported to the technical director to give him a quick overview of all projectsin work.The paper gives a detailed description of Safety Monitoring: what is checked, who checks,what are the consequences and so on.