Grant: Engage Grants Program

This NSERC Engage project aims to perform a functional safety assessment for a 3D safety sensing system, which his designed and is currently under test by S.A.F.E. Engineering Inc. for three-dimensional zone monitoring. This system is used to safeguard personnel in the vicinity of moving machinery. Whenever a monitored volume is violated, the system will shut down the operating machinery within that volume, so as to prevent human injury. Existing commercial products only function at the two-dimensional level and S.A.F.E. Engineering Inc. is believed to be the pioneer company investigating the 3D safety technology. In order for this product to attract more customers, the quantitative reliability level of this product needs to be determined. This presents a challenge to S.A.F.E. Engineering Inc. since the 3D safety system integrates both hardware and software, and there is no consensus on appropriate methods to evaluate reliability for hardware-software integrated systems. The applicant proposes an enhanced input domain-based model that is to be used to capture the specific characteristics presented by software-hardware integrated systems such as event dependency and timing sequence. Furthermore, Bayesian stopping rules are going to be used to determine what confidence level of probability of failure on demand will be acceptable. To carry out this research, the project is divided into four stages. The first month is used to familiarize the researchers with the 3D safety monitoring system through observing the operating process and consulting S.A.F.E. Engineering Inc. personnel. The goal at the end of this stage is to identify the key components that need to be captured by the enhanced input domain-based model. The second stage will be on the design of the enhanced input domain-based model. This is expected to last for two months, after which the Bayesian stopping rules will be investigated to provide statistical evidence to support the reliability of the integrated system by testing consecutive demands without failure. The last stage will be on report writing. The proposed functional safety assessment is expected to not only bring economic benefits to S.A.F.E. Engineering Inc., but also to bring safety benefits for Canadians.