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Relationship of EN 954-1 and IEC 61508 Standards.

Some safety equipment vendors provide some details on their products and state their products conform to the EN 954-1 standard. The relationship between EN 954-1 and IEC 61508, if any, is not clear. Could you clarify an explanation of this and other safety related standards e.g. DIN/TV would also be useful.

Anton A. Frederickson, Mr., Dr. (prepared answer) Independent Consultant member of Safety Users Group Network 01 April, 2002

In order to answer the question, the scope and content of each standard are summarized in the paragraphs below.

EN 954-1 Standard
EN 954-1 is a European Standard developed by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and was first released in November 1992. The standard was developed for the safety of machinery and is titled Safety of Machinery, Safety related parts of control systems. The standard has two parts: Part 1: General principles for design, and Part 2: Validation, testing, fault lists. The standard makes numerous references to the EN 292-1:1991 standard for basic terminology and methodology. EN 954-1 sets out a procedure for the selection and design of safety measures. The procedure contains the following 5 steps: 1) Hazard analysis and risk assessment, 2) Decide measures to reduce risk, 3) Specify safety requirements to be provided by the safety related parts of the control system, 4) Design, and 5) Validation. EN 954-1 also provides a list of typical safety functions: 1) Stop, 2) Emergency stop, 3) Manual reset, 4) Start and restart, 5) Response time, 6) Safety related parameters, 7) Local control functions, 8) Fluctuations, loss and restoration of power sources, 9) Muting, and 10) Manual suspension of safety functions. Categories that define the behavior of the safety related parts of the control system are specified in the EN 954-1 standard. The categories are B, 1, 2, 3 and 4 with category B being the lowest with no special measures for safety, and Category 4 being the highest where no single fault shall lead to loss of safety and the single fault shall be detected. An Annex provides guidance for the selection of categories. The EN 954-1 standard should be used for the development of low complexity safety-related systems for the machinery.

EC 61508 Standard
IEC 61508 is an international standard developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the first edition was released in December 1998. The IEC 61508 standard consists of the following parts, under the general title - Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic (E/E/PE) safety-related systems: Part 1: General requirements Part 2: Requirements for electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems Part 3: Software requirements Part 4: Definitions and abbreviations Part 5: Examples of methods for the determination of safety integrity levels Part 6: Guidance on the application of IEC 61508-2 and IEC 61508-3

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Part 7: Overview of techniques and measures Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the IEC 61508 standard are basic safety publications that facilitate the development of application sector standards and enable the development of E/E/PE safety-related systems where application sector standards do not exist. However this basic safety publication status does not apply in the context of low complexity E/E/PE safety-related systems. The standard defines a low complexity E/E/PE safety-related system as a system in which the failure modes of each individual component are well defined and the behavior of the system under fault conditions can be completely determined. Safety-related systems for machines (e.g. packaging machines, printing machines and presses) are typically considered to be low complexity. The IEC 61508 standard should be used to develop safety-related systems for applications requiring more complex systems.

DIN 19250 and DIN 0801

The German DIN standards (DIN 19250 and DIN 0801) were developed for safety related systems and were applicable to E/E/PE safety-related systems. The DIN 19250 standard defines the relationship between risk and the required German Requirement Class. The standard uses a risk graph with consequence, frequency and exposure, probability of avoiding hazard, and the probability of unwanted occurrence as inputs. These four parameters define the requirement class that is required for the application. The DIN 0801 defines the techniques and measures that are required to meet each of the German Requirement Classes. These techniques and measures are dependent on the requirement class and are used to control the effect of hardware failures and systematic failures. Until the release of IEC 61508, the TUV in Germany certified PE safety-related systems for compliance to the DIN standards. These systems were typically certified for use in applications requiring the German Requirement Classes 1 through 6. The IEC 61508 Part 2 standard has incorporated many of the DIN standard requirements. Part 5 of the IEC 61508 standard has incorporated an example of a risk graph that is similar to the DIN 19250 standard. With the release of the IEC 61508 standard, the TUV is now certifying PE safety-related systems to the IEC 61508 standard.

This document has been prepared by: Anton A. Frederickson, Mr., Dr. For more information see full contact details in Safety Users Group Directory

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