Abstract
To meet the growing needs from a variety of stakeholders, the development of modern systems is getting more complex and thus, the systems failure in the actual operations can potentially become more serious. This is why several international or military standards on systems safety have been published. In spite of the importance of meeting those standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 in the systems development, the associated practical methods seem deficient since those standards do not provide them. The objective of this paper is to present a method to identify potential hazards in fulfilling the requirements of the safety standards. In particular, the approach taken here is based on applying the functional analysis that covers several levels of the system under development. Note, however, that in the most of the conventional methods for hazards identification, the analysis has been focused on the failure at or underneath the component level of the system. The hazards identification method in this paper would cover the level up to the system by utilizing the functions-oriented approach. The case study of the safety enhancement for locomotive cabs is also discussed.