B Reports

With Functional Safety Suite it is possible to create professional reports within seconds (ok, the actual creation of the report might take some minutes or even hours if you have large models with transient evaluation and importancies calculation, but you can drink some coffee or watch TV or talk to your boss in the meantime).

Note: All described functionality has been tested with Microsoft Office 365, with German language settings. If you encounter any problems with other Microsoft Office/Microsoft Word versions or language settings, don’t hesitate to send some problem report, including the .docx file that doesn’t work as intended. If you want some company specific modification of the report template or some additional feature, also write to the email stated on the front page of this manual.

B.1 Create a Report

B.1.1 Automatic work

Click Export – Create Report directly after loading a project.

A dialog will appear, providing several options in order to adjust the content of the report to your needs, see figure 83.


PIC

Figure 83: The create report dialog


Page Layout Set the page layout. The corresponding template in the templates folder will be selected.

Note: You can modify the templates according to your needs to some extend. In particular, you can change the text formats, the header and footer, the page size and page margins, add some text etc.

Graphics options Select if the graphics in the report shall be vector graphics (Drawing ML format) or pictures (bitmaps in PNG format). Vector graphics can be edited, but they are displayed correctly only in newer versions of Microsoft Word (Microsoft Office). Pictures cannot be edited, but they will be correctly shown even in older versions of Microsoft Word and some other programs.

FTA/RBD options Select whether lists of the minimal cut-sets / prime implicants shall be included or not. The list will be sorted for importance, i. e. the minimal cut-sets with highest value will be the first in the list. The number of lines of the list will be limited to the number stated here, since it typically doesn’t make sense to have list hundreds of pages.

Select whether a sub-tree, that is used by several top-level fault trees (or RBDs) is added only once at the end of the report, or if it shall be added to the section of each top-level fault tree that uses it. Note: If you decide to add sub-trees only once in the report, each sub-tree will be calculated separately using the evaluation parameters assigned to the sub-tree. If you decide to add separate sub-trees for each top-level fault tree section, the sub-trees will be evaluated using the evaluation parameters assignd to the top-tree.

Importancies Select the importancies that shall be calculated for each (top) model. Note that importancies calculation might take quite some while, in particular in case of transient evaluation.

B.1.2 Post-work

After successful creation of the report (see status line and text output), you’ll find the report file in the project directory. Its name consists of the project name, extended by date and time of its creation. Open the report file in Microsoft Word (Microsoft Office 365). Mark all via Ctrl+A and then press F9 in order to update all fields. Now you can complete the report. In particular, you might want to adapt the front page, the headers and footers, add references to the input documents that have been used for performing the analysis, add descriptions for each model, add a summary section etc.

Feel free to add text, figures or tables wherever you want, but in order to be able to update the report automatically (see next subsection), you should not do the following:

B.2 Update a Report

There is no project without changes. Thus, also the quantitative risk evaluation report will be subject to change. Often only minor changes need to be introduced, such as a corrected failure rate or a corrected fault tree.

Therefore Functional Safety Suite provides the function to update an existing report in case of typical changes by Export – Update Report. A dialog will ask you to select the existing report file that shall be used as the template for the update. A new report will be created, where all automatically created figures and tables will be replaced by new ones. The existing file will not be changed.

B.3 Important notes related to reports

1.
If you define a large header or footer, don’t forget to adjust the page margins in Microsoft Word accordingly. (depending on your particular version, you might find that under “Layout – Page Margins – User defined page margins – Page Margins – Top/Bottom”). Select “Apply to overall document”, not only current section. If you don’t increase the page margins sufficiently, the size of figures will not be correctly calculated so that you’d have to adjust them manually.
2.
You can modify or even delete the section “Warning, Hints, Information”. If you do an update, a new section will be added at the end of the document in any case.
3.
The page number format ‘section - page in section’ has been selected in order to reliably predict the page number of the refered model while creating the figures, and to allow you to add text of any length or figures or tables at (more or less) any place in the document. Unfortunately, the page number format is not compatible with Libre Office.
4.
You should create or update a report before any model has been calculated. If you don’t do so, the warnings, hints and information section might not be complete (it will only contain the information of those models that haven’t been calculated previously).
5.
If you mark some event, state, condition etc. the marking will also be visible in the related figure(s) in the report. This might be intended or not.
6.
If you’ve modified the report by other tools than Microsoft Word, the update will probably not work. In particular, Libre Office deletes the file “report_properties.xml” which is included in the ‘.docx’ file while the report is created and which is necessary to update the report.
7.
If you change the structure of the project, i. e. if you add or delete models, change the name of models or packages etc., the report might not be updated correctly. In that case, it might be necessary to create a new report as explained in section B.1, and copy all manually added text/graphics/tables to the new report manually. The same applies if you want to change any of the report options.