The objective of a safety analysis is to identify potentially safety-relevant faults or malfunctions. This allows the resulting hazardous influences to be recognised, evaluated and eliminated as appropriate.
Safety analyses can be used to confirm a selected system concept or to improve a system architecture with regard to safety requirements. This is done by identifying weak areas based on the results of the analysis. Furthermore, the analysis may reveal areas in the architecture which may require a higher level of diagnostic coverage (i.e. the probability of detecting the occurrence of a fault) in order to enable the achievement of a safe condition in the event of a failure, for example.
In addition, situations or ambient conditions such as extreme heat or electromagnetic interferences, which may contribute to a violation of the safety objectives, can be detected or evaluated.