[SystemSafety] ISO and IEC Technical Specifications on Functional Safety and AI

[Kindermann Michael]

Hello everybody!

Generally I like to stay out of the discussion here although I appreciate this resource very much. As my company works on automation devices and especially small proximity sensors I would get a quite narrow viewing angle so it is important to get information like I get it here, from avionics through railway through other systems.

Unfortunately I don't have further information on the self-driving car industry and what they do to justify what they put on the market. In Germany you would have the institution of the Kraftfahrtbundesamt as an institution and I am very sure that they are quite conservative about that. But this shows why everybody is eager on rulesets regarding AI in functional safety so we are working on that.

Very interesting that we standardize safety and AI while there still is debate about what AI really is. But actually there seem to be some systems that might save lives so we need to look under which circumstances that can be allowed. I think if I would need to defend the use of AI in safety at the moment people would ask why I took that risk and used AI. Somewhere in the future it could be that I need to defend myself because I didn't use AI because it would have prevented the accident. Some say that moment will never come. Some say this moment is in the past, maybe not for something as complex as self-driving cars but perhaps in other applications with perhaps less dimensional inputs.

Some would say risk reduction below SIL 1 should not be regulated too strongly. But when I think about how people put some data into a system and cheer if it showed nice behaviour it might be good to ask about requirement management, configuration management and solid proof of validity of the concept - so speak about functional safety management to the AI audience. That's the direction now that the ISO/IEC group will meet in Sydney this week for TS 22440.

But not to bore with this stuff - maybe not a safety application but a case where people are detected using WLAN routers - even if they don't have WLAN devices with them. A little scary but they say in a different article that they could distinguish people walking into a room even when they carried a container with bottles of beer. That showed me that this is a realistic University scenario here in Germany. This is the only resource I found in English but it is actually also distributed from other sources.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/wifi-tech-can-identify-individuals

Curious where AI and safety will go. Have a good week!
Michael

--
Michael KINDERMANN (he/him)
Head of Functional Safety
Team Leader Safety & Security
Dpt. Global Compliance
Pepperl+Fuchs SE, Mannheim



Pepperl+Fuchs SE, Mannheim
Vorstand/Board member: Dr. Wilhelm Nehring (Vors.), Tobias Blöcher, Lutz Liebers, Reiner Müller, Florian Ochs, Martin Walter
Vorsitzende des Aufsichtsrats/Chairwoman of the supervisory board: Monika Müller-Michael
Registergericht/Register Court: AG Mannheim HRB 737016 ∙ UST-ID Nr. DE 143877372

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