What is Functional Safety

This chapter deals with the functional safety of distributed embedded control systems following the component-based approach. The authors define a new concept of components called “Control Component” (CC) to cover all of the used technologies in industry. To guarantee the functional safety of distributed control software components, the authors define an agent-based architecture where an intelligent software agent is deployed in a device of the execution environment in order to apply local reconfiguration scenarios, and a coordination agent is used for inter-devices coordination in order to allow coherent reconfigurations.