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As products and systems become increasingly complex, the risk of technical failures rises. However, it is possible to reduce the likelihood that a failure will lead to a severe accident. Lowering safety risks is essential not only for meeting customer safety requirements but also for enhancing your company's reputation.
Method 1: Increase Components’ Reliability
Advantages:
Reduced Failure Rate: Enhancing component reliability lowers the system failure rate, which directly decreases the probability of safety incidents. Key metrics such as Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Failure Rate serve as standard measures of reliability.
Disadvantages:
Costly Improvements: For already manufactured components, improving reliability necessitates root cause analysis and potentially expensive research.
Limited Control: If using Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, integrators have minimal influence over design and reliability.
Higher Costs: More reliable components often come at a premium price.
BQR Solution for Increasing Reliability:
BQR’s fiXtress® and CircuitHawk™ tools identify electronic circuit design errors during development, significantly lowering the risk of field failures while reducing overall development time. Additionally, fiXtress includes MTBF calculations according to leading standards, and professional analysis services are available, allowing you to focus on your core technology while leveraging BQR’s expertise.
Method 2: Add Redundancy
Advantages:
Increased System Resilience: Implementing redundancy decreases the system failure rate by requiring multiple failures for a system to fail. Common types of redundancy include:
Hot Redundancy: A redundant unit operates continuously, taking over immediately upon primary unit failure.
Standby Redundancy: A backup unit remains inactive until needed, which may result in downtime during the transition.
Load Sharing: Multiple units share the operational load. If one unit fails, the others compensate, though this may increase their failure rates.
Disadvantages:
Higher Costs: More components lead to increased product and system costs.
Maintenance Needs: More active components can lower MTBF, resulting in a higher maintenance burden.
Common Cause Failures: If redundant components are identical, they may fail simultaneously due to shared vulnerabilities.
Complexity: A failure detection mechanism is often needed to switch to redundant components, introducing additional points of potential failure.
BQR Solution for Redundancy and Safety Analysis:
BQR’s RBD software provides reliability allocation and calculation analyses, helping determine the best redundancy strategy during early design stages. Later, detailed calculations ensure the design meets reliability requirements. BQR’s Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA/FMECA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) help assess the impacts and severity of various failure modes. These analyses are also available as professional services.
Method 3: Failure Detection and Mitigation
Advantages:
Reduced Severity: Failure detection systems and fail-safe mechanisms mitigate the impact of failures, leading to safer outcomes.
Implementation Ease: Detection systems can often be easier to implement than methods 1 and 2.
Disadvantages:
Operational Impact: The operation of the product or system may be affected during a failure event.
BQR Solution for Failure Detection:
BQR’s unique testability analysis software enables the development of optimal Built-In Test (BIT) policies to achieve high coverage of potential failures. Testability Analysis is also available as a professional service.
Conclusion
Achieving safety involves a strategic combination of the three methods outlined above. The optimal approach varies by product or system. For example:
Critical Equipment: Extensive production control and testing are essential to ensure high reliability.
Remote Systems: Redundancies are commonly employed in systems located in hard-to-reach areas.
Electronic Circuits: Many circuits are designed with multiple BITs for power-up, continuous operation, and maintenance.