USING SOFTWARE ENCODED PROCESSING TO ACHIEVE A SIL RATING FOR SAFETY APPLICATIONS EXECUTED IN THE CLOUD OR IN NON-SAFETY RATED SERVERS

A cloud-based industrial safety system executes safety applications and interfaces with industrial assets on the plant floor using software encoded processing (SEP). The use of SEP ensures safety reliable execution of safety applications and data communication software by redundantly executing native code, thereby implementing a level of software-based fault detection that is independent of the hardware on which the safety application operates. This allows the cloud-based industrial safety applications to achieve at least SIL3 safety ratings for safety services even though the safety applications are executed using standard COTS hardware that is commonplace in the server market. The use of SEP to reliably execute safety software on the cloud can make possible a wide variety of safety applications that would be difficult to implement using purely localized industrial safety systems.