Towards a safer future in the Autonomous Factory

Safety equipment prevents accidents or even disastrous events in all types of technical machinery or systems, every day. May it be at our workplace or even in our every-day life. Do you ever consider how many times you mindlessly put on your car seat belt before heading to work? Or how often you are relying on elevator safety brakes that would mitigate the disaster of a snapped cable? For the Autonomous Factory, Siemens will provide advanced safety measures that will greatly reduce the risk of accidents, without restricting the performance and flexibility of the production process. 

Safe collaboration between human beings and autonomous systems 

In the future, we strive for autonomy of different systems and machines in a factory to optimize production processes and make them more flexible. Autonomous machines may move unexpectedly or behave unpredictably, and therefore pose a risk to the people collaborating with them. This risk is what makes safety so important. To not lose our goal on the long run, the so-called “puzzle pieces” guide us at Siemens to realize the Autonomous Factory, with safety being one of them. With our focus on safety, we will significantly further help to decrease the likeliness to be exposed to a risk, allowing companies to conduct their operations safely. Developing new technologies enables many more possibilities: Autonomous robots and flexible production are just a few examples.

Preventing accidents is a requirement

In the beginning, many of these possibilities may be unpredictable and may hold yet unforeseen safety risks within them. Therefore, we need to develop safety concepts around technologies to keep people working in these environments safe. Siemens works with its concept “Safety Integrated” in a wide range of our products. This simply means that all safety measures our customers might need are already readily available within most of our products. Both machine builders as well as plant operators benefit from this concept which significantly reduces their engineering effort. 

“The prevention of accidents is not a question of legal regulation, but corporate responsibility and also a requirement of economic reason” – Werner von Siemens (1880)

Reducing the engineering effort is an important goal for all kind of reconfigurable machinery or plants. Working towards the Autonomous Factory, frequent reconfiguration is inevitable. Of course, after each reconfiguration, all risks must be adequately mitigated. To achieve this, there are two potential solutions. First, the process of safe commissioning including risk assessment, as well as verification and validation of safety functions must be radically simplified. This would allow us to perform this process after each reconfiguration. Second, there is also the approach to do the safe commissioning in such a generic way, that arbitrary reconfiguration is possible. This implies that the assumptions made for safety evaluation are not violated by a reconfiguration. Clearly, both approaches require a careful design of the machines and machine modules, and many open questions exist on how to achieve this in practice. 

Together we can overcome safety challenges 

Numerous experts in Functional Safety – not only at Siemens but also our partners and customers – have been continuously working on making safety systems smarter, easier to install, less error-prone, and thereby increasing plant availability and reducing the number of accidents at the same time. It has become clear that no company can solve the safety challenges arising in the Autonomous Factory alone. Rather, we expect many innovative safety devices coming from different vendors. Be it individual components such as sensors, actuators or safety controllers, tools such as engineering systems for safety functions, as well as ready-made modules such as collaborative robots and safe Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGV). These building blocks must then be combined in new creative ways to finally create the safe workplaces of the future. A prerequisite for this scenario is a well-defined, generic communication interface for all kind of safety devices. This is where OPC UA Safety comes into play, a specification jointly developed by PROFIBUS & PROFINET International (PI) and the OPC Foundation. 

OPC UA Safety offers safe data exchange of arbitrarily structured user data with a length of up to 1500 bytes per cycle. A key feature of OPC UA Safety is the possibility to select the communication partner at runtime, making it possible to communicate with varying partners at different times. For instance, an AGV moving around in plant is thereby enabled to communicate with different machines, depending on its current position. Of course, specifications such as OPC UA Safety can only be seen as the very first building blocks for an Autonomous Factory, and a long journey still lies ahead of us. The challenges and opportunities are numerous: Is it necessary, for instance, that an AGV always keeps a large distance to all obstacles? Wouldn’t it rather make sense to differentiate between different types of obstacles? This would enable an AGV to move into narrow passages but still avoiding all potential collisions with human workers. 

It starts with an idea

In the future we can look forward to an Autonomous Factory that is both smart and safe – a factory with freely roaming AGVs and robots interacting with humans, a factory which requires less engineering effort and is still safe. Very soon, these scenarios will be as normal to some factory workers as fastening a seat belt. It is about ensuring safety to the point where people do not have to question it anymore. We admit: The industry still has some tasks to tackle. Nevertheless, we already reach one achievement after another for Functional Safety, but we strive to realize safety functions of the future that once used to be mere ideas. 

If you have more specific questions about Safety or you want to join the journey please contact Max Walter, our principal key expert for Functional Safety via max.walter@siemens.com!