According to information from the China National Intellectual Property Administration, ABB  has filed a patent titled “Method for Operating a Safety Controller—Parallelization,” with publication number CN121411302A, submitted in June 2025.

The invention relates to an optimized method for operating safety controllers used in safety-critical industrial engineering systems, aiming to improve execution efficiency and processing performance in complex automation environments.

The patent describes a method in which a set of safety functions defining logical dependencies between sensor signals (32S) and actuator signals (33S) is categorized into a first class and a second class. The first class of safety functions is compiled and linked into a first executable program code, while the second class is compiled and linked into a second executable program code.

Both executable codes are then stored in the memory of the safety controller. The system executes the first code on a first processor and the second code on a second processor in parallel, generating actuator signals based on incoming sensor signals through simultaneous processing.

This parallel execution architecture improves processing efficiency and system responsiveness, offering enhanced reliability and performance for safety-critical industrial automation applications.