New standards for machinery safety-related control systems - BS EN ISO 13849-1 & BS EN 62061

摘要

BS EN ISO 13849-1 (Safety of machinery, Safety related parts of control systems, General principles for design) is now a harmonised European standard and the standard that it replaces, BS EN 954-1 (Safety of machinery, Safety related parts of control systems, General principles for design), will be completely withdrawn in November 2009. While the titles of these two standards may be similar, the approaches are very different, with the new standard calling for more rigorous, quantitative, risk-based assessments than is necessary for compliance with the requirements of BS EN 954-1. An emphasis on functional safety is also apparent in BS EN 62061. This standard was harmonised to the Machinery Directive in January 2006, which gives a subtle but important shift in its status. BS EN 62061 (Safety of machinery, functional safety of safety-related electrical, electronic and programmable electronic control systems) is a machinery-specific daughter standard to BS EN 61508 (Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related control systems).