Rainer Faller has over 20 years of professional experience. His expertise is in the areas of international standards application and safety instrumentation systems. He has extensive experience in pipelines, chemical industry applications, machinery applications and power plant applications. He was formerly Business Unit Manager of TÜV Product Service IQSE (Automation, Software and Electronics). This organization has become the world’s leading safety certification agency. Mr. Faller has developed this group into a significant business unit while at the same time developing and promoting the entire concept of third party safety certification across the world. Mr. Faller’s signature is on most of the equipment safety certifications in the world. Mr. Faller is widely recognized as the world’s top safety and reliability expert. He is frequently sought after for speaking engagements and has published many of the technical papers used as reference in this technical community. He is chairman of the German DIN committee on “Computers in safety systems and applications” Mr. Faller has earned the Dipl.-Ing. from Technische Universität München.
Stephan Aschenbrenner has over seven years of experience and extensive knowledge in the safety and reliability field. After graduating from University, he began working for Gustav Klein where he was responsible for software and hardware of programmable electronic systems. In 1995, he joined TUV Product Service GmbH where he became responsible for machinery safety devices. In 1998, Aschenbrenner joined TUV Product Service Inc. in the USA to set up a functional safety department for the Americas. During this time he became Business Unit Manager of "Automation, Software, and Electronics" at TUV Product Service. This position provided him with worldwide responsibility. In 2000, Aschenbrenner joined exida.com as an employee and has recently been named a partner.
Rolf Spiker has over 40 years experience in Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) used in the Petrochemical and Oil & Gas Exploration and Production industries. He has fulfilled a wide variety of functions within the Yokogawa System Center Europe organization and preceding companies and was heavily involved in the development of the companies Safety Systems and has two Safety Systems patents on his name. Via electronic development engineer, project manager, sales engineer/manager, marketing manager, managing director of the Safety Systems group in the Netherlands, president of the US safety systems office, he finished his career as 'Senior Safety Consultant' in the Yokogawa SCE company. In this activity, Mr. Spiker has established a new safety patent for the use of Neural Networks in Instrumented Safety Systems and has written and co-authored several articles about safety systems and their application in the industry. He was also involved in many presentations for the Instrument Society of America, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, WIB and Botlek group.
Jon Keswick has more than 15 years of professional experience working in various control, automation and instrumentation vendor companies. His expertise includes in-depth knowledge of safety standards, with specific focus on safety instrumented systems and related equipment employed in the process sector. This includes applications in Oil and Gas, Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals and Power generation industries. Jon was instrumental in the successful uptake of programmable electronic systems employed in safety related applications during the mid to late 90's across Europe and the Middle East, and worked in a senior lead technical role for a safety system vendor during much of this period. He comes directly from a role which involved international responsibility for the setup and development of a process safety business stream within a major international system vendor, and brings in-depth knowledge about the market, products and systems employed in safety related applications.
David Hatch has 20 years Design, Commissioning, Operating and Consulting experience in the Oil & Gas, Pharmaceutical and Chemical industries. This experience covers blue-chip operating companies (BP, Shell & GSK), major multinational engineering contractors (Jacobs, Foster Wheeler & Stone & Webster) and system suppliers (Emerson Process Management) Mr Hatch has a BSc(Hons) in Chemical and Process Engineering, is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers in the UK and an IChemE Registered Safety Professional. He is a member of the IChemE Safety & Loss Prevention Subject Group and a specialist in Process Automation, Hazard Analysis and Alarm Management; authoring and presenting papers on these key subjects".
Mats Gunnmarker has more than 20 years of professional experience working in various companies with hardware and software design, development and test, control and safety system engineering as well as certification. With over 10 years of experience in safety and high availability system architectures, safety concepts and design he joined exida.com as a partner in 2007. Mats Gunnmarker has three patents related to safety system design on his name and is member of the Norwegian Electrotechnical Committee for standardization, NEK.
Mats Gunnmarker has a M.Sc. in Electrical engineering from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
William Goble has over 30 years of professional experience. He is widely recognized as an expert in programmable electronic systems analysis, safety and high availability automation systems, automation systems new product development and market analysis. He developed many of the techniques used for probabilistic evaluation of safety and high availability automation systems. He was formerly Director, Critical Systems at a successful North American safety company. His principal work responsibilities included strategic planning, market analysis, promotion and business management. Dr. Goble previously held positions in research and development including computer design, software design and development, engineering project management and marketing. Dr. Goble also teaches reliability engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written two widely used books on topics of safety and reliability modeling including "Control Systems Safety Evaluation and Reliability," available on the exida.com website. He teaches many of the exida.com courses and ES35, an ISA professional course on safety and reliability. He is a fellow member of ISA. He has published many papers and magazine articles. Dr. Goble has a BSEE from Penn State, a MSEE from Villanova and a PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
John Grebe has over 26 years of experience in industrial and medical instrumentation. He has a wide breadth of experience encompassing New Product Development (both hardware and software), Manufacturing Engineering, Manufacturing Test, Quality Control, Process Definition, Process Improvement, Field Service and Customer Support and specializes in services and products to assist companies in cost effective development of safety-related products. He was formerly the Senior Director of Product Development for a firm creating decision support software for the Chemical Process Industries. Previous experience also includes over 10 years with a North American firm in the process control industry holding a variety of positions including Director of Systems Engineering, which he founded, and Director of Embedded Products. As an engineer his areas of expertise include functional safety, low-level analog signal acquisition, microprocessors and software architecture. Additional industry experience includes flow meter design for an industry leader. He holds nine U.S. patents on products in the process control industry. Mr. Grebe has taught for the ISA professional courses on safety and reliability. He also teaches topics in Engineering Management as an Adjunct Instructor for Drexel University's Masters Program in Engineering Management. Mr. Grebe has a BSEE and a MSEE from Drexel University and a MBA from Villanova University.
Iwan van Beurden is the director of engineering at exida. He supports exida’s End-user services, exida’s Manufacturer services, and exida certification activities and has over 11 years professional experience in the Safety Instrumented System field. Iwan is responsible for the development, maintenance, and certification of the exSILentia integrated Safety Lifecycle tool, combining SILect, SIF SRS, and SILver. He performs IEC 61508 development support, Functional Safety Assessments, a variety of reliability analyses, SIL Selections and SIL Verifications. He also performs process gap analyses to determine the level of effort companies need to undertake for compliance with IEC 61508 or IEC 61511. Iwan gives training for exida and is also an ISA instructor. He previously worked for Yokogawa Industrial Safety Systems in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. He worked both in the R&D and in the Operations department as a Safety Assessment specialist. He was involved with the implementation of IEC 61508 within Yokogawa Industrial Safety Systems dealing with SIS reliability calculations and the safety education of engineers. Iwan is a member of ISA. He has published various papers and magazine articles. He is a Certified Functional Safety Expert and holds a Master of Science degree from Eindhoven University of Technology in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, where he majored in reliability engineering and graduated cum laude.
Mr. Miller has over 17 years of experience in process instrumentation, control and automation, safety instrumented systems design and project execution with several large corporations in the Gulf Region including Honeywell, Exxon, and Siemens. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and is currently the ISA - Bluebonnet (Austin & San Antonio) President.
Mr. Kozma has over twenty years of experi ence in process control and automation, safety instrumentati on systems design and project executi on. Kozma is a Senior Safety Speciali st with exida and responsibl e for process safety and safety instrumented design and veri ficati on proj ects. In his currentposition, he has sol id experi ence in SIS impl ementation projects for a variety of process plants, with special emphasis in
the Western Canadian Oil & Gas Sector. Mr. Kozma has worked with several engineering and operating companies where he successfully implemented several projects including pipeline safety, burner management, and SIS. Mr. Kozma has a diploma in Electrical Engineering echnology from the
Southern Alberta Insti tute of T echnol ogy. He is also a Certified Functional Safety Expert (CFSE).
David Fournier has over 30 years’ design analysis, control system product and application, and safety system experience in the nuclear industry, primarily in Canada but also in the U.S. and overseas. Mr. Fournier joined exida as partner after retiring from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, where he had been Principal Engineer (I&C), and company expert in real-time system design, categorisation (nuclear equivalent to SIL selection) and project manager for various large software projects. Mr. Fournier was a key design leader for control and safety systems currently operating in more than 12 CANDU plants, 5 BWRs and 4 PWRs.
Mr. Fournier holds a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science and M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto. He is a Professional Engineer, registered in the Province of Ontario.
He is currently a Canadian delegate to the IEC TC45A Committee, member of WGA3 and WGA7, and chairing one of the working parties in WGA7. (These committees are responsible for standards such as IEC 61513, 61226 and 62138.)
Eric W. Scharpf joined exida.com as a partner in September of 2000 and is based out of Port Chalmers, New Zealand. He has 10 years of professional experience in the chemical processing industry. Dr. Scharpf is recognized as an expert in chemical process efficiency analysis and improvement. He developed several of the cryogenic gas processing and separation techniques currently used for hydrogen, synthesis gas, and power generation. He was most recently a Lead Process Chemical Engineer with a Fortune 200 gas and chemical processing company. principal work responsibilities have included engineering research and development, project execution, safety and risk analysis, and operations / manufacturing efficiency and reliability improvement in the bulk gas and specialty chemicals industry. He has authored more than 10 US and international patents as well as several journal articles and conference publications. Currently, he teaches process optimization and energy management at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. As part of exida.com, he will be teaching several of the exida.com safety and reliability analysis courses and supporting customers in the Australia / New Zealand region. Dr. Scharpf has a B.Ch.E. from the University of Delaware, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University, both in the USA.
Dr. Wright has over 20 years of professional experience. He is widely recognized for his work in the design and implementation of high availability control and safety systems. He has founded and developed successful consulting and engineering organizations, based in Singapore and specializing in safety systems design and engineering services, and specialist third-party services throughout the Asia-Pacific region. He was formerly the Regional Manager (AP) for the Centre of Competence (Safety Systems) for a major European programmable safety system manufacturer, with the responsibility for providing consulting services (Safety Systems) to End Users and EPC contractors, and providing safety-specialist support for regional teams. Prior to that he was the Regional Engineering Manager (AP) for a major North American programmable safety system manufacturer, with his principal work responsibilities including the design, implementation, and validation of safety systems. Dr. Wright also teaches ISA courses "Evaluation Control System Reliability" & "Designing & Applying Emergency Shutdown Systems". He has published a number of papers and articles, and has conducted workshops on aspects of safety systems and related standards. Dr. Wright has a BA from Monash University in Australia, and a PhD from Edinburgh University in the United Kingdom.
Mr. Tavener-Smith has over 20 years of professional experience. He has for the past 15 years been involved in the design, engineering and supply of safety related systems for process industries. For the past 7 years he has been a member of the senior management team of one of the leading suppliers of safety related systems globally. His former position was Divisional Manager, responsible for the strategic direction and operations for the Sub-Saharan African region supplying safety related systems and solutions. Mr Tavener-Smith also lectures process safety engineering at the University of KwaZulu Natal.
Rainer Faller has over 20 years of professional experience. His expertise is in the areas of international standards application and safety instrumentation systems. He has extensive experience in pipelines, chemical industry applications, machinery applications and power plant applications. He was formerly Business Unit Manager of TÜV Product Service IQSE (Automation, Software and Electronics). This organization has become the world’s leading safety certification agency. Mr. Faller has developed this group into a significant business unit while at the same time developing and promoting the entire concept of third party safety certification across the world. Mr. Faller’s signature is on most of the equipment safety certifications in the world. Mr. Faller is widely recognized as the world’s top safety and reliability expert. He is frequently sought after for speaking engagements and has published many of the technical papers used as reference in this technical community. He is chairman of the German DIN committee on “Computers in safety systems and applications” Mr. Faller has earned the Dipl.-Ing. from Technische Universität München.
Stephan Aschenbrenner has over seven years of experience and extensive knowledge in the safety and reliability field. After graduating from University, he began working for Gustav Klein where he was responsible for software and hardware of programmable electronic systems. In 1995, he joined TUV Product Service GmbH where he became responsible for machinery safety devices. In 1998, Aschenbrenner joined TUV Product Service Inc. in the USA to set up a functional safety department for the Americas. During this time he became Business Unit Manager of "Automation, Software, and Electronics" at TUV Product Service. This position provided him with worldwide responsibility. In 2000, Aschenbrenner joined exida.com as an employee and has recently been named a partner.
Rolf Spiker has over 40 years experience in Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) used in the Petrochemical and Oil & Gas Exploration and Production industries. He has fulfilled a wide variety of functions within the Yokogawa System Center Europe organization and preceding companies and was heavily involved in the development of the companies Safety Systems and has two Safety Systems patents on his name. Via electronic development engineer, project manager, sales engineer/manager, marketing manager, managing director of the Safety Systems group in the Netherlands, president of the US safety systems office, he finished his career as 'Senior Safety Consultant' in the Yokogawa SCE company. In this activity, Mr. Spiker has established a new safety patent for the use of Neural Networks in Instrumented Safety Systems and has written and co-authored several articles about safety systems and their application in the industry. He was also involved in many presentations for the Instrument Society of America, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, WIB and Botlek group.
Jon Keswick has more than 15 years of professional experience working in various control, automation and instrumentation vendor companies. His expertise includes in-depth knowledge of safety standards, with specific focus on safety instrumented systems and related equipment employed in the process sector. This includes applications in Oil and Gas, Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals and Power generation industries. Jon was instrumental in the successful uptake of programmable electronic systems employed in safety related applications during the mid to late 90's across Europe and the Middle East, and worked in a senior lead technical role for a safety system vendor during much of this period. He comes directly from a role which involved international responsibility for the setup and development of a process safety business stream within a major international system vendor, and brings in-depth knowledge about the market, products and systems employed in safety related applications.
Mats Gunnmarker has more than 20 years of professional experience working in various companies with hardware and software design, development and test, control and safety system engineering as well as certification. With over 10 years of experience in safety and high availability system architectures, safety concepts and design he joined exida.com as a partner in 2007. Mats Gunnmarker has three patents related to safety system design on his name and is member of the Norwegian Electrotechnical Committee for standardization, NEK.
Mats Gunnmarker has a M.Sc. in Electrical engineering from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
William Goble has over 30 years of professional experience. He is widely recognized as an expert in programmable electronic systems analysis, safety and high availability automation systems, automation systems new product development and market analysis. He developed many of the techniques used for probabilistic evaluation of safety and high availability automation systems. He was formerly Director, Critical Systems at a successful North American safety company. His principal work responsibilities included strategic planning, market analysis, promotion and business management. Dr. Goble previously held positions in research and development including computer design, software design and development, engineering project management and marketing. Dr. Goble also teaches reliability engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written two widely used books on topics of safety and reliability modeling including "Control Systems Safety Evaluation and Reliability," available on the exida.com website. He teaches many of the exida.com courses and ES35, an ISA professional course on safety and reliability. He is a fellow member of ISA. He has published many papers and magazine articles. Dr. Goble has a BSEE from Penn State, a MSEE from Villanova and a PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
John Grebe has over 26 years of experience in industrial and medical instrumentation. He has a wide breadth of experience encompassing New Product Development (both hardware and software), Manufacturing Engineering, Manufacturing Test, Quality Control, Process Definition, Process Improvement, Field Service and Customer Support and specializes in services and products to assist companies in cost effective development of safety-related products. He was formerly the Senior Director of Product Development for a firm creating decision support software for the Chemical Process Industries. Previous experience also includes over 10 years with a North American firm in the process control industry holding a variety of positions including Director of Systems Engineering, which he founded, and Director of Embedded Products. As an engineer his areas of expertise include functional safety, low-level analog signal acquisition, microprocessors and software architecture. Additional industry experience includes flow meter design for an industry leader. He holds nine U.S. patents on products in the process control industry. Mr. Grebe has taught for the ISA professional courses on safety and reliability. He also teaches topics in Engineering Management as an Adjunct Instructor for Drexel University's Masters Program in Engineering Management. Mr. Grebe has a BSEE and a MSEE from Drexel University and a MBA from Villanova University.
Iwan van Beurden is the director of engineering at exida. He supports exida’s End-user services, exida’s Manufacturer services, and exida certification activities and has over 11 years professional experience in the Safety Instrumented System field. Iwan is responsible for the development, maintenance, and certification of the exSILentia integrated Safety Lifecycle tool, combining SILect, SIF SRS, and SILver. He performs IEC 61508 development support, Functional Safety Assessments, a variety of reliability analyses, SIL Selections and SIL Verifications. He also performs process gap analyses to determine the level of effort companies need to undertake for compliance with IEC 61508 or IEC 61511. Iwan gives training for exida and is also an ISA instructor. He previously worked for Yokogawa Industrial Safety Systems in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. He worked both in the R&D and in the Operations department as a Safety Assessment specialist. He was involved with the implementation of IEC 61508 within Yokogawa Industrial Safety Systems dealing with SIS reliability calculations and the safety education of engineers. Iwan is a member of ISA. He has published various papers and magazine articles. He is a Certified Functional Safety Expert and holds a Master of Science degree from Eindhoven University of Technology in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, where he majored in reliability engineering and graduated cum laude.
Mr. Miller has over 17 years of experience in process instrumentation, control and automation, safety instrumented systems design and project execution with several large corporations in the Gulf Region including Honeywell, Exxon, and Siemens. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and is currently the ISA - Bluebonnet (Austin & San Antonio) President.
Mr. Kozma has over twenty years of experi ence in process control and automation, safety instrumentati on systems design and project executi on. Kozma is a Senior Safety Speciali st with exida and responsibl e for process safety and safety instrumented design and veri ficati on proj ects. In his currentposition, he has sol id experi ence in SIS impl ementation projects for a variety of process plants, with special emphasis in
the Western Canadian Oil & Gas Sector. Mr. Kozma has worked with several engineering and operating companies where he successfully implemented several projects including pipeline safety, burner management, and SIS. Mr. Kozma has a diploma in Electrical Engineering echnology from the
Southern Alberta Insti tute of T echnol ogy. He is also a Certified Functional Safety Expert (CFSE). 
Eric W. Scharpf joined exida.com as a partner in September of 2000 and is based out of Port Chalmers, New Zealand. He has 10 years of professional experience in the chemical processing industry. Dr. Scharpf is recognized as an expert in chemical process efficiency analysis and improvement. He developed several of the cryogenic gas processing and separation techniques currently used for hydrogen, synthesis gas, and power generation. He was most recently a Lead Process Chemical Engineer with a Fortune 200 gas and chemical processing company. principal work responsibilities have included engineering research and development, project execution, safety and risk analysis, and operations / manufacturing efficiency and reliability improvement in the bulk gas and specialty chemicals industry. He has authored more than 10 US and international patents as well as several journal articles and conference publications. Currently, he teaches process optimization and energy management at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. As part of exida.com, he will be teaching several of the exida.com safety and reliability analysis courses and supporting customers in the Australia / New Zealand region. Dr. Scharpf has a B.Ch.E. from the University of Delaware, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University, both in the USA.
Dr. Wright has over 20 years of professional experience. He is widely recognized for his work in the design and implementation of high availability control and safety systems. He has founded and developed successful consulting and engineering organizations, based in Singapore and specializing in safety systems design and engineering services, and specialist third-party services throughout the Asia-Pacific region. He was formerly the Regional Manager (AP) for the Centre of Competence (Safety Systems) for a major European programmable safety system manufacturer, with the responsibility for providing consulting services (Safety Systems) to End Users and EPC contractors, and providing safety-specialist support for regional teams. Prior to that he was the Regional Engineering Manager (AP) for a major North American programmable safety system manufacturer, with his principal work responsibilities including the design, implementation, and validation of safety systems. Dr. Wright also teaches ISA courses "Evaluation Control System Reliability" & "Designing & Applying Emergency Shutdown Systems". He has published a number of papers and articles, and has conducted workshops on aspects of safety systems and related standards. Dr. Wright has a BA from Monash University in Australia, and a PhD from Edinburgh University in the United Kingdom.
Mr. Tavener-Smith has over 20 years of professional experience. He has for the past 15 years been involved in the design, engineering and supply of safety related systems for process industries. For the past 7 years he has been a member of the senior management team of one of the leading suppliers of safety related systems globally. His former position was Divisional Manager, responsible for the strategic direction and operations for the Sub-Saharan African region supplying safety related systems and solutions. Mr Tavener-Smith also lectures process safety engineering at the University of KwaZulu Natal.
