Scalable Safety-Oriented Architectures for Mechatronic Components and Systems in Agricultural and Heavy-Duty Machines

The growing importance of electronics and machine automation in the agricultural and heavy-duty industry compartments, introduces a new set of issues related to the functional safety of these systems. The international community has recognized these problematics and a particular effort has been put on the implementation of new standards and regulations specific for the functional safety. Since the great machine diversification of these industry compartments and their small market numbers, it is of primary importance the development of new scalable architectures and components compliant with the specific standards, which can be easily customized for different applications. This thesis deals with the identification such architecture. The key idea of the proposed work is to reduce the software safety requirements, in order to ease the customization of the system for different applications, reducing at the same time, the effort of software certification, which is considered prohibitive for many small and medium sized companies. In Chapter 1 it will be introduced the functional safety basic concepts, with reference to different standards. The Chapter 2 will focus on the architecture design, which is the main result of this thesis. It will be also described an implementation of the proposed architecture for the realization of an advanced machine controller for agricultural machines. In chapters 3 it will be described the methodologies and development process, carried out during a technology transfer activity, inherent a steer-by-wire system of an innovative 6 wheeled self-propelled agricultural machine. Finally, Chapter 4 will describe the design of a mechatronic component that represents an innovative solution for the realization of novel electro-hydraulic architectures for heavy-duty machinery.