AutoFMEA™ Safety Analysis and FMEA Report Generation for Simulink® and Stateflow®
What is AutoFMEA™ ?
AutoFMEA™ is an advanced model based engineering tool that allows safety/reliability analysis to be undertaken in parallel with functional design.
AutoFMEA™ is designed to work with Matlab® Simulink®
AutoFMEA™ generates FMEAs and fault reports automatically
AutoFMEA™ encourages engineers to consider safety and reliability during the specification and design stages when using model based engineering techniques
AutoFMEA™ allows engineers to assess their design for safety and reliability at an early stage thus leading to a more rigorous design with associated and potentially significant cost savings
AutoFMEA™ is available with either a floating or node-locked licence.
Why Use AutoFMEA™ for Safety Analysis?
Where safety is important, then it must be embedded into the design process.
Currently safety analysis is a very manual process with lengthy manual reviews being required to reduce errors to an acceptable level. It is difficult to propagate the safety analysis thorough each design stage and significant work is required to update the safety analysis when changes occur.
The “pain” of such changes may result in only essential changes being allowed.
The solution is to use a Model-based Design approach for both Functionality and Safety, thus optimising the system design through parallel development. The tools for both safety analysis and functional design must be integrated and Safety analysis must be as automated as possible.
AutoFMEA™ is an integrated tool that operates within the Matlab® Simulink® environment and facilitates the evolution of the safety analysis throughout the design lifecycle. The automated generation of FMEA reports reduces the effort and cost of FMEA reports and allows engineers to focus on the key task of analysis. The report generated considers the impact of multiple failures as well as single point failures.
How Does AutoFMEA™ Operate?
When using AutoFMEA™ the engineer follows a sequential series of steps that become progressively easier as AutoFMEA™ libraries develop.
The first step is to define a set of faults that apply to the system along with optional failure rates. These faults are then associated with elements of the application to be analysed.
During the analysis the faults are used by AutoFMEA™ to generate an extended model with fault blocks integrated. The extended model is used in the analysis.
The next step is to define a set of undesirable states (hazards) that are derived from the system requirements. These are in effect definitions of assessments of outputs from the application to be analysed.
e.g. a combination of outputs outside certain tolerances or an unacceptable variance between inputs and outputs.
The final configuration step is to define a set of test scenarios that will be applied to the application during analysis. This is in effect a test harness that is implemented as one or more models.
After configuration the engineer may run AutoFMEA™ with the defined and selected scenarios driving system inputs. The model can be executed without faults injected to baseline the system performance and may also be run with one or more faults injected to assess the net affect of faults on the system.
During analysis AutoFMEA™ assesses the system outputs against the selected user defined “hazard” criteria given the inputs generated by the scenarios.
AutoFMEA™ then generates a report highlighting the impact of faults on the system, where failure probabilities have been defined then a Markov analysis is undertaken to calculate the probability of defined hazards occurring.
AutoFMEA™ Features
The Ricardo tool includes the following functions:
Licence Manager – Integrates with the Ricardo Licence Manager supporting Node-locked and Floating licences
Library Editor – Supports the definition and management of Faults, Hazards and Scenarios
Analyser – Executes the model using selected Faults and Scenarios and assesses model against Hazards
Report Generator – Generates an FMEA report derived from the analysed data
AutoFMEA™ currently supports the following MathWorks products and we aim to support new Mathworks releases within 3 months of their own formal updates:
R2006a (MATLAB 7.2, Simulink 6.4, Stateflow 6.4)
R2006b (MATLAB 7.3, Simulink 6.5, Stateflow 6.5)
R2007a (MATLAB 7.4, Simulink 6.6, Stateflow 6.6)
R2007b (MATLAB 7.5, Simulink 7.0, Stateflow 7.0)
R2008a (MATLAB 7.6, Simulink 7.1, Stateflow 7.1)
The Ricardo licence manager supports the following operating systems (with both English and Japanese):
Windows NT, 2000, 2003 or XP running on Intel x86
HP-UX 11.x running on hp700
Sun Solaris 32 Bit
Please contact Ricardo for confirmation of other platforms that you may wish to use.
Request further information or an evaluation
A presentation about AutoFMEA™ can be viewed using the following link
If you would like to evaluate AutoFMEA™ or discuss the tool further then please contact us at the following email address: RS_Support@ricardo.com providing your contact name, your company details, your role within your organisation and your telephone number.
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