Functional Safety ― Concepts and Standards

Abstract

　It may not be an exaggeration to say that functional safety is now an essential subject for all engineers. However, functional safety is difficult to understand by anyone other than safety experts. One of the reasons for this is that it is often talked about in the system of international standards rather than in the academic system, and people who do not know the basic matters tend to have no idea what they are talking about even if they read the standards.
　The authors have written a textbook on functional safety with the aim of helping understand the concept of functional safety from the basics under this social context. This article extracts the essence of the textbook, presents the basic points related to functional safety, and introduces its recent trends.