Dependability and functional safety with applications to industrial electronics

In this article, the two corpuses of dependability theory and functional safety standards are explicated with the purpose of providing a comprehensive treatment of them. It is shown how one corpus supplements the other with regard to safety. On this matter, dependability theory is limited to the enunciation of principles without paying attention to their practical implementation, while functional safety standards address the characteristics of the extra systems used to obtain a given safety level. This article closes with two case studies that exemplify the issues of dependability and functional safety for industrial electronics systems.