IEC 61511: 2016 Process Industry Sector

IEC 61511 is a technical standard that sets out practices in the engineering of systems that ensure the safety of an industrial process through the use of instrumentation. It entails requirements for users of process control and instrumentation for component / element or sub-system safety. Unlike IEC 61508, this standard is targeted toward the process industry users of safety instrumented systems. 

The main objective of IEC 61511 is to use safety instrumented systems to reduce risk to a tolerable level by following the overall hardware and software safety lifecycle procedures and by maintaining the associated documentation.

Like IEC 61508, this standard focuses on a set of safety lifecycle processes to manage process risk. It was originally published by the IEC in 2003, with its latest edition published in 2016. 

Fun Facts about IEC 61511:

• Applies to all “Automatic Protection Systems” – E/E/PE
• Falls under IEC 61508 umbrella
• Defines the concept of SIL & the Safety Lifecycle.
• Contains 3 parts – 1 Framework and 2 guidelines
• Talks in end user terms