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Applications and Safety Concepts
Safety is the most
important aspect
of our industry
Safety-relevant
industrial
automation
many of our thoughts and energies, is that of safety. Providing for the safe
operation of trains is our paramount responsibility and in railroading seemingly
innocuous issues can suddenly and irreversibly be revealed in events that range
from threatening to catastrophic. The issue of safety is not just a facet of the
industry, it is the industry.
It is this characteristic which separates railroad automation from industrial
automation - at least the vast majority of industrial automation. Most factory
automation engineers may have to respond to a threat of limited property
damage and some health threat to workers in the immediate area of controlled
equipment - very few have to calculate the potential for catastrophic events.
Notice that I said very few - I did not say none.
There exists an ever-increasing segment of the industrial automation industry
that is primarily concerned with safety-relevant control. The applications are
varied but many of them are comparable to the risk profiles encountered in
railroading given the potential for catastrophic events. Chemical processing,
radioactive material handling, and metallurgical production were the obvious
instigators of this development, but the definition of safety relevant processes is
becoming increasingly common as European factories continue to expand their
definitions of what requires safety-critical control. The increasingly regulated
nature of the EU may be one reason for this expansion, however the ability to
apply safety-certified products economically (due to newly available safety PLCs)
is certainly also playing a role.
