An Approach Based on Context and Situation Awareness to Improve Functional Safety in Complex Scenarios

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, industries are increasingly oriented toward real-time communication, Big Data analysis, human–machine cooperation, remote sensing, monitoring, process control, and autonomous equipment. Industry 4.0 will bring changes that will have an increasing impact on the management of companies’ economic development, the efficiency of workplaces, and the health of employees. In this scenario, which opens up new job opportunities such as agile work and remote control of industries, a key role is played by safety management. In this regard, functional safety plays a significant role, representing the engineering branch dealing with safety systems through electronic and information technologies. The concept of functional safety encompasses the overall safety of equipment and associated control systems. It depends on the proper functioning of the components responsible for mitigating the dangers arising from possible errors, failures, or random or systematic malfunctions. This paper proposes an approach for realizing an intelligent and highly scalable architecture for the supervision and control of plants and infrastructures. This system, characterized by a high level of context awareness, must be implemented through modern methodologies for describing, managing, and analyzing the context itself and risk forecasting.