Good things happened in the fields of functional safety and control system cybersecurity in 2015.  I am not going to include the exciting new Star Wars movie as an event in the list as it does not really fit into the topic. But keeping focused, my highlights is 2015 were:

• Progress was made on a new version of IEC 61511
• The CFSE program was updated and enhanced
• Good progress was made on several of the IEC 62443 automation cybersecurity standards
• exida completed ANSI accreditation per the new ISO/IEC 17065 standard for product certification programs
• A new OREDA field failure data analysis was published

At exida we were also to get the CFSE program upgraded with many new questions that represent the maturity of functional safety knowledge.  For those of us at exida who do failure rate research, the new OREDA dataset was quite a thrill, maybe not more than Star Wars VII, but maybe it was because we were able to use this high quality field data to compare to the FMEDA predicted failure rates for several different product types.  We were able to publish several new papers describing the analysis process and the results.  So far it appears as if most FMEDA predictions are well within range of OREDA.

New standards are coming.  At the ISA SP84 meeting in November 2015 it was announced that the new IEC 61511 would be available in 2016.  We at exida are spending a lot of time on the IEC 62443 series of control system cybersecurity standards.  These are moving along well and most are useable right now though not finished.

So, good progress.  Lots getting accomplished in spite of the low crude oil price. AND I just heard on the news that the next Star Wars movie release date was pushed back from Summer 2017 to December 2017.  That gives lots of time to debate if Rey is the daughter of Luke Skywalker or not.