Where to get Functional Safety & SIL Training?

Functional Safety has been growing in importance every year. As more and more plants and equipment becomes automated, this phenomenon will only increase. There are a lot of job opportunities in this highly specialized and niche area, that you can dominate, if you have the right knowledge, skills and some experience. Nothing beats a very good training course to get this knowledge easily. If you subscribe to an online ecourse, then you can learn at your own pace and not be bound by timings or the need to travel.
Are there such good courses that you can enroll into? Of course there are! You can check out what Abhisam has to offer. In addition to an excellent Safety Instrumented Systems course, that helps you learn about Functional safety and Safety Integrity level in detail, with easy to understand animations and simulations, text, actual real life examples and situations, exercises that stimulate your brain to understand the concepts and lastly, a certification exam that earns you an electronic badge via Credly, that you can proudly display on your LinkedIn profile. Of course you also receive a certificate that shows that you have competency in the subject. You also get 40 PDH (professional development hours) when you complete this ecourse.This has become very important in todays world, where if you do not demonstrate visibly about your skills and knowledge, then you may be never approached by potential recruiters or clients.
Contrary to popular belief, safety is a vast subject. It is not just about wearing personal protective equipment. In fact due to increased use of automation, most of safety in plants toady depend on automated safety instrumented systems that take immediate action to shut down the process in case of any deviations. But this is not the only area where this technology is used. In fact it is used in automotive industry a lot, it is used in airplanes and even elevators. It is also used in the machinery industry. Every application area is different and has different standards that you must learn and understand.
The main functional safety standard, that can be said to be the mother of all standards, is IEC 61508. This is published by the International Electrotechnical Commission (hence the acronym IEC) and has seven parts, out of which the first four are normative and the rest three are informative.
Every industry sector has its own standard that is derived from this main standard. So the process industry (think chemical manufacturing, oil and gas, etc) has IEC 61511, the machinery sector (think lathe machines, presses, etc) follows IEC 62061 and the railway industry follows EN 50126, EN 50127 and EN50128. The automotive industry has ISO 26262. (Note: Even though this is an ISO standard, it is derived from IEC 61508 only).
You need an easy to understand training course so that you can understand the complexities of these systems and the best way forward is to enroll in the Abhisam Safety Instrumented System course. This is focused on IEC 61508 and IEC 61511, so it is useful for people in the process industry as well as automation system integrators, HIPPS suppliers, BMS suppliers and of course engineering consultants and end users.

Triconex SIS attacked by malware-new development in Safety Instrumented Systems

A worrying incident has recently occurred in a critical process plant, that had a Triconex Safety Instrumented Systems as the Safety System. As many of you must be aware, Triconex was one of the first systems in the industry to offer Triple Modular Redundant (TMR) architecture. This was a 2oo3 voting logic system, making it one of the systems that had high safety availability, as well as process availability. Over the years the company was bought by various different automation companies including the likes of ABB. Today it is owned by Schneider.
In this Fireye reported case, apparently somebody could reverse engineer the Triconex programming tool and create a malware that had the potential of blocking any action by the system in case of a dangerous detected failure. This malware has been given the name TRITON. It is not clear who or which organization would go to such a great length to create a malware that would bypass a safety system, but it is wakeup call for all process plant owner operators to tighten their operational security policies and procedures.
It is inconceivable that such a program could have been loaded into the system without the connivance of insiders, since it was an airgapped system without any connection to the internet (apparently).

Safety Instrumented Systems Training

There has been a lot of progress and change in the Safety Instrumented Systems field now in the past five years. The standard IEC 61508 was updated in the year 2010 (actually it took almost a year that is in year 2011 for the changed standard to percolate in the industry). This had a number of important changes as compared to the earlier version, such as evaluating whether the security of the SIS is OK, calculating the resultant safety integrity level of connected subsystems of different SIL rated devices in series and parallel combinations, introduction of the concept of No Part Failures and No Effect failures and so on.
Later on in 2016, the IEC 61511 standard (Part 1) was also updated. There were several changes including those related to the competency of personnel in the updated portion.
The best way of updating your own knowledge to be current with these new developments is to learn via e-learning courses such as those provided by Abhisam, which also offer a free certification option for personnel on passing their exam.

How to learn about Safety Integrity Level (SIL) & Functional Safety

April 13, 2014- For those of you who wish to know and understand more about Functional Safety, Safety Integrity Level (SIL) and associated stuff, there are basically four ways to do it. Here is a lsit of them with their associated advantages and disadvantages:
a) Surf the web- just like you likely found this page while searching for terms like SIL or Functional Safety. There will be hundreds or even thousands or articles than range from the fairly easy to understand to the completely complex ones which may leave you gasping for breath (or bored enough to go to sleep). Also the variety and scope will be mind boggling. You will learn all the jargon though...to impress your friends who have no idea about SIL or Functional Safety.
b) Read a book. There are a few about Functional Safety & SIL. None of them covers everything though, so you will have to buy at least three of them to learn anything of value. Of course even if you read them and understand the concepts, you will have nothing in your hand that proves to the world that you know your stuff!
c) Download the Safety Instrumented Systems e-learning course from Abhisam, that covers everything about SIL and Functional Safety in one, short, easy to understand course. There are several animations and simulations that explain key concepts and make this difficult to understand subject very easy to learn. Besides you can take their online exam and get a Certificate of Competency too, on passing!