Functional Safety and Reliability

Ensuring reliability and functional safety is a mandatory prerequisite for bringing safety-critical systems to market. Ever higher levels of automation and the increasing use of AI present new challenges in terms of safeguarding. Reliability and safety considerations can be applied to both technical products and processes such as manufacturing processes or supply chain management. Fraunhofer Automotive Rail focuses primarily on the reliability, functional safety and service life of automotive components and systems. Within Fraunhofer Automotive Rail, methods and processes are being developed that allow the use phase to be analyzed and simulated in order to ensure safe and reliable operation over a defined service life.

Both integrated numerical and experimental methods are used to estimate reliability and functional safety. Complementary to this, system reliability methods such as FMEA or FTA, which allow the consideration of cause-effect relationships and probabilities, or model-based safety engineering methods are used.