Re: IEC 61508 and SIL definitions



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From: Peter B. Ladkin (ladkin(at)rvs.uni-bielefeld.de)
Date: Thu 15 Jul 2004 - 06:50:34 BST


     [PBL] That's one catastrophic airplane-model
     failure every 14 months. Happy with that? I wouldn't fly on an
     airplane of which some example broke apart every 14 months.

     [PB] Surely the point of setting claim limits on an SRS
     is that you need to use **several** **diverse** safety functions
     to achieve a tolerable accident rate.

     Nobody is stopping you having several safety functions in the
     aircraft to prevent the same accident(s).

I don't think I was claiming that IEC 61508 *forces* one to build
inappropriate devices. But that is the argument your comment seems to
address.

     Also in UK Defstan 00-56, [....] you can get away with a single
     SIL4 safety function.

[I think you mean "cannot" here.]

As Felix Redmill wrote four years ago, the use of SILs in DefStan 00-56 and
their use in IEC 61508 are different.

     PS
     I keep getting virus email messages from:

     mtmiller(at)crnotes.cca.rockwell.com
     ......
     - in fact it could be from ANYONE on the safety-critical list.

You cannot draw the line so narrowly, based on this information alone.
The From: header is mostly unhelpful. The most reliable information is
obtainable from the Received: headers. They should enable you to determine
the mail servers and therefore the ISP through which the mails are coming.
I would suspect that the messages are not coming through any server at
Rockwell, because big tech companies usually check these things nowadays.

PBL

-- 
Peter B. Ladkin PhD FBCS CW(hon)
Professor of Computer Networks and Distributed Systems,
Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel (Vx/msg/Fax) +49 (0)521 880 7319 http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de

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