OUR EXPERIENCE

XEFRA has a long history in providing Safety testing & Assessment services to Manufacturer of safety critical products, system.

We are present as specialists in:

  • RAMS
  • Security
  • Functional Testing
  • Verification and Validation
  • Risk Assessment

and we support you to accelerate your business and accompany you in the revolution thanks to Taylor Made and accredited services.

At XEFRA you will find specialists with extensive experience in the field of railway signaling, automotive and industrial control systems.

VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION - RAMS

Completing a project successfully is the demonstration of having accomplished to customer and standards requirements.

XEFRA applies European standard V cycle approach by performing a V&V activity that assure the customer to arrive at the final acceptance phase having considered and covered all safety aspects according to the Standard.

We help customer in demonstrating the compliance to the CENELEC EN 50126 through:

  • Assessment of safety concepts (definition of suitable safety development processes).
  • Verification of development documentation.
  • Safety Requirements Verification and Tracking during the whole V-cycle.
  • Qualitative (System FMEA, Functional Block FMEDA, component FMEDA).
  • Quantitative analyses (Markov, FTA).
  • Hazard and risk analyses.
  • Hazard Log Maintenance.
  • Test Strategy Definition.
  • Availability and Maintainability analysis on Products and Systems FRACAS.
  • Penetration Analysis.
  • Analysis of software development processes.

RAILWAY SAFETY MANAGEMENT

The aim of safety management is to design processes in such a manner as to achieve safety targets by correctly identifying responsibilities, decisions, planning, methods.

At XEFRA, basing our approach on EN 50126, EN 50128, EN 50129 and CSM REA we support manufacturer and Railway Manager by providing management services such as:

  • Project Management.
  • Evaluation of Management Systems and optimisation.
  • Definition of Safe Operation Procedures
  • Inspections and measurements.
  • Quality Assurance, Quality Control (QA/QC) & Safety audits.

FUNCTIONAL SAFETY FOR MACHINERY

XEFRA provides developers and testers of safety-related machine controls with comprehensive support in the evaluation of safety in the context of ISO 13849-1. We support you modelling the structure of the safety-related control components based upon the designated architectures, thereby permitting calculation of the reliability values with various levels of detail, including that of the attained Performance Level (PL).

Relevant parameters such as the risk parameters for determining the required performance level (PLr), the category of the SRP/CS, measures against common- cause failures (CCF) on multi-channel systems, the average component quality (MTTFd) and the average test quality (DCavg) of components and blocks, are defined in our functional safety reports.

XEFRA delivery also the following services:

  • development of life cycle with validation measures that indicate how and when the SRP/CS should be validated, for example, following a change.
  • Function tests plan and report
  • Data and control flow description of safety critical software through condition diagram or software flow chart.

SAFETY IN AUTONOMOUS DRIVING

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning play key roles in the development of autonomous vehicles. But there are new safety challenges that autonomous (and semiautonomous) vehicle software developers are facing. That’s why SOTIF (ISO/PAS 21448) was developed. Here, we explain what is SOTIF and the different parts of ISO 21448. SOTIF-Definition from ISO/PAS 21448: “absence of unreasonable risk due to hazards resulting from functional insufficiencies of the intended functionality or from reasonably foreseeable misuse by persons” ISO 21448 applies to systems such as emergency intervention systems and advanced driver assistance systems. These systems could have safety hazards — without system failure. Using ISO 21448 will be key to ensure that AI artificial intelligence is able to make decisions and avoid safety hazards. XEFRA supports the OEM, Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers in the following safety concept steps:

  • Item definition Simplification process of the HARA through the subdivision of the vehicles into functional items.
  • Scenario catalogues We have developed a catalogue of critical vehicle scenarios to simplify the approach to the HARA and thus reduce the OEM’s effort.
  • Safety mechanisms: Definition of safety mechanisms outside the function for further simplification of the HARA.
  • Quantitative risk analysis ASIL apportionment and duration or frequency definition of the level of exposure to the driver’s danger, as indicated in the standard, can be based on duration or frequency.
  • Product measures Technical measures against random HW failures and systematic HW and SW failures.

Product requirements identification of the characteristics of commercial products that make up the Vehicle Control System (SEooC for automotive).

CYBER SECURITY

Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment (TARA)

Cybersecurity is the state of a system that does not allow exploitation of vulnerabilities to lead to losses, such as financial, operational, privacy, or safety losses

  • All safety-critical systems are security-critical since a cyber-attack either directly or indirectly on a safety-critical system could lead to potential safety losses
  • Not all security-critical systems are safety-critical
  • Some systems are both, safety and security critical
  • Cybersecurity is not concerned with random hardware failures, but it is concerned with systematic hardware vulnerabilities
  • Attack Tree Analysis we are not concerned with single-point and multi-point random hardware failures, but rather with determining potential paths that an attacker could take through the system to lead to the top level threat
  • Vulnerability Assessment The process of performing penetration tests on a system to find common vulnerabilities and provide mitigation techniques to those specific vulnerabilities

XEFRA deliverables: Vulnerability Report, Mitigation Report, Penetration tests

SOFTWARE TESTING

We are a software testing laboratory that provides cost efficient software testing for safety and security critical projects in the industrial automation, railway, automotive, avionic, medical and process industries domains.

Complete integration with your engineering team (development/testing) with a dedicated and extremely customer-faced Account Manager to ensure your satisfaction and handle escalations.

Xefra is the first Italian Laboratory accredited ISO IEC 17025 by ACCREDIA for :

ISO 26262-2:2018 Road vehicles – Functional Safety Part 6 Product development at the software level
§9 Software Unit Verification
§10 Software Integration and Verification
§11 Testing of the Embedded Software
EN 50128:2011/AC:2014 + EN 50128:2011/A1:2020/A2:2020 + IEC 62279:2015 Railway applications – Communication, signalling and processing systems – Software for railway control and protection systems
§4 Objectives, conformance and software safety integrity levels
§5 Software management and Organization
§6 Software Assurance
§7 Generic Software developement
IEC 61508-3:2010 Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety related systems Part 3: Software requirements
§4 Objectives, conformance and software safety integrity levels
§7 Software safety lifecycle requirements
§8 Functional Safety Assessment

Testing with release of accredited test report can be provided according to three different approaches:

  • Testing Lab – We perform testing in our Laboratory by using proprietary and qualified tools and benches.
  • Testing Customer Premises – We perform testing at Customer Premises by integrating customer HW and Tools where necessary.
  • Witness Testing – We witness our Customer Testing.
';