As the number, complexity and interaction of electrical, electronic and programmable electronic (E/E/PE) systems increase, a growing emphasis has been placed on the concept of functional safety during product development. IEC 61508 provides guidelines and standardized procedures in the development of reliable and dependable E/E/PE systems to assure functional safety. Determining risk classes (i.e., safety integrity levels, SILs) associated to a specific E/E/PE item may be recognized as one of the most crucial activities in the product development per IEC 61508 since SILs are used to specify necessary safety requirements for achieving an acceptable residual risk. This article presents a case study on the assessment of SILs applying failure modes, effects and diagnostic analysis (FMEDA) from which failure rates may be derived for each important failure category by combining a standard FMEA with online diagnostic techniques.

Reactor protection system to keep nuclear safety and operational economy of plants requires high reliability. Such a high reliability of the system can be achieved through the redundant design of components. However, common cause failures of components reduce the benefits of redundant design. Thus, the common cause failure analysis, to accurately calculate the reliability of the reactor protection system, is carried out using alpha-factor model. Analysis results to 24 operating months are that 1) the system reliability satisfies the reliability goal of EPRI-URD and 2) the common cause failure contributes 90% of the system unreliability. The uncertainty analysis using alpha factor parameters of 0.05 and 0.95 quantile values shows significantly large difference in the system unreliability.

Increasing safety requirements of automobile are asking companies to find out solutions, based on the ISO 26262 which is a functional safety standard. ISO 26262 is an adaptation of the IEC 61508 for automotive electric/electronic systems. ISO 26262 provides a V model for ECU (Electronic Control Unit) development process to secure safety against vehicle. It well describes the requirements, necessary works and their resulting products for each development phase. However, it is difficult to apply to product development for achieving functional safety in the electric/electronic systems of an automobile because it lacks explanation on the working steps to follow and the methodologies and tools to be used in each step. In this paper, we introduce the outline of the ISO 26262 product development process and present a DFSS (Design For Six Sigma) road-map based on the ISO 26262 product development process as a way to operate efficiently the ISO 26262 product development process. The DFSS road-map consists of five phases: Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify. The detailed activities, tools, inputs, and work products are given for each phase.

The reliability performance measures for low and high or continuous demand modes of operation of safety instrumented systems(SISs) are examined and compared by analyzing the official definitions in IEC 61508 standard. This paper also presents a status of common cause factor(CCF) models used in IEC 61508 and problems relating CCF modelling are discussed and ideas to solve these ones are suggested. An example with mixed M-out-of-N architecture is carried out to illustrate the proposed methods.

One of the activities to improve software quality in ISO 26262 is to apply the design principles for software unit design and implementation mentioned in ISO 26262-6, including the evaluation activity. Before evaluation activity, the tool is compared and selected for evaluation. Because the results of the tool a company selected might have an effect on product quality. In this paper, we suggest the method to compare industrial static analysis tools with some of "MISRA C : 2004 Exemplar Suite" and all lessons learned from comparing tools are described. The result on comparison shows that we just couldn't rely on a result of Static Analysis Tool and need to have another appropriate processes and guidelines to evaluate a software.

In this article, we introduced the estimation method by 'Safety Integrity Level'(SIL) for the criterion of safety assurance and performed a case study on a flame scanner. SIL requires probabilistic evaluation of each set of equipment used to reduce risk in a safety related system. FMEDA(Failure Modes, Effects and Diagnostic Analysis) method is widely used to evaluate the safety levels and provides information on the failure rates and failure mode distributions necessary to calculate a diagnostic coverage factor for a part or a component. Basically, two parameters resulting from FMEDA are used for SIL classification of the device : SFF(Safe Failure Fraction) and PFD(Probability of Failure on Demand). In this case study, it is concluded that the flame scanner is designed to fulfill the condition of SIL 3 in the aspect of SFF and PFD.

Since pooling is a popular scheme in many areas to attain operational excellence, many researchers investigated the performance of pooling systems. However, rare research could be found on pooling with game situation which has much applicability to real world phenomenon. We analyze the performance of noncooperative pooling system with two servers having different sharing capacity. We investigate the sensitivity of the advantage of capacity pooling on the variation of system parameters, including sharing capacity numbers, pooling probability, pooling strategy and traffic intensity. As a result, we suggest an efficient control policy which facilitate the performance of pooling in a game situation.

Solar PV(photovoltaic) is paid great attention to as a possible renewable energy source to overcome recent global energy crisis. However to be a viable alternative energy source compared with fossil fuel, its market competitiveness should be attained. Grid parity is one of effective measure of market competitiveness of renewable energy. In this paper, we forecast the grid parity timing of solar PV energy in Korea using two factor learning curve model. Two factors considered in the present model are production capacity and technological improvement. As a result, it is forecasted that the grid parity will be achieved in 2019 in Korea.

This study addresses the call admission control(CAC) problem for OFDMA wireless communication systems in which both subcarriers and power should be considered together as the system resources. To lessen the exccessive allocation of radio resources for protecting handoff calls, the proposed CAC allows the less data rate than their requirements to handoff calls. The CAC problem is formulated as a semi-Markov decision process(SMDP) with constraints on the blocking probabilities of handoff calls. Some extensive experiments are conducted to show the usefulness of the proposed CAC model.

In this study, we investigate the cooperative relationships between researchers who have co-authorship in the logistics-related journals in Korea by using social network analysis (SNA). We analyzed the co-authorship data of 781 articles published from 2005 to 2011 in four journals of 'Logistics Study', 'Journal of Korean Society of SCM', 'Korea Logistics Review' and 'Journal of Shipping and Logistics.' We examined the trend of cooperative research in the field of logistics with basic data of the co-authorship network. Then, we analyzed structural properties of the network and the sub-networks of research groups having co-authorship. We could verify the authors who play important roles within the network by using SNA indicators. In addition, we constructed the keyword networks based on the keyword data of all articles by research groups in order to understand the research topics of each group, and thereby we could draw several implications on the cooperative researches in the field of logistics.

Before an aircraft is delivered to customers, manufacturers have to verify required reliability for the aircraft. In usual, reliability of electronic equipments in military aircraft are predicted based on MIL-HDBK-217. But the specification has not been revised since 1995. Some alternatives including SR-332 and 217PLUS are suggested in this study. The processes and methods specified in MIL-HDBK-217 are compared with those of SR-332. Additionally, the predicted reliability of aircraft electronic equipment between usage data and field data are investigated using MIL-HDBK-217. The results show that predicted reliability of MIL-HDBK-217 is more conservative (underestimated) than that of usage data and field data.