Initial situation in machine safety
In practice, however, automatic reconfiguration has not yet been used, or hardly at all. The reason for this is that reconfiguration of a production plant always requires renewed safety certification. This includes both information security ("Security") with a risk and threat analysis according to IEC 62443, as well as functional safety ("Safety") with a risk assessment according to IEC 61508 or ISO 12100. These analysis and certifications are costly and are currently performed manually by experts. The increase in efficiency and the time savings that basically result from automatic reconfiguration technologies are strongly relativized by this circumstance and very often even equalized.
The project
In the AutoS² research project, (i) requirements for the automation of risk assessment are identified and (ii) a possible semantics for the administration shell (AAS) is defined and implemented. The third building block is the (iii) implementation of an assessment algorithm that performs the risk assessment in an automated way.
In doing so, the foundations for an automated assessment system of safety & security properties that are relevant for adaptive production and intelligent technical systems will be created. For this purpose, the information required for an automated safety assessment will be determined, standardized and expressed in machine-readable form. The collected characteristics for Safety & Security will be automatically monitored and evaluated by AI-based algorithms.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are expected to benefit most of all. This is because they often cannot afford their own specialists with the necessary safety and security expertise.