Functional safety standard is `a first`

The PLCopen organisation claims to have published industry`s first functional safety standard. The organisation`s Technical Committee 5 (TC5) has spent 2½ years developing the document which describes the specification with the aid of state diagrams.

PLCopen says that the specification will help users to achieve functional safety more easily at the plant and machine level, and independently of the underlying architecture. The specification provides a software model and explains the concept of generic function blocks. It defines 20 of these blocks as well as outlining the PLCopen certification procedure.

There are references to applicable standards, and descriptions of functional checks and error codes and behaviour.

The PLCopen safety software specification can be downloaded free of charge from the organisation`s Web site.