Functional Safety: a total Quality Approach

Many systems used by the CERN accelerators and the technical infrastructure have to respect stringent requirements in terms of reliability, safety, availability and maintainability either for operation, security, or legal aspects such as the one required by French Regulatory Authority: the INB (Installations Nucléaires de Base ). The functional safety approach provides a structured method for achieving these requirements. In particular, the new IEC 61508 standards give guidance for system design and an effective and safe system exploitation. When designing new systems, it also sets out a generic approach for all the safety lifecycle activities that are the base for a total quality approach: requirements, design, realization, installation, operation, maintenance and even the decommissioning. This paper gives the results of the first attempts made at the CERN Technical Service division (ST) to use these standards and gives some suggestions on how to improve functional safety in a particle accelerator environment.