Safety of individual products - Perspectives in the context of current practices and challenges

The safety of products is one essential feature on the way to approval. Methods of safety analysis are applied to ensure this. Facing growing demand for individual products and stricter regulations, these analyses require increasing efforts. In mechanical and mechatronic engineering, these analyses in practice are dominated by traditional methods. Current research aims to improve and enhance this process of considering safety during all stages in design. However, these works mainly focus on software or embedded systems. Thus, this paper aims to understand the current practices and challenges in mechanical or mechatronic engineering. It examines existing approaches from literature and records the industrial practices within an interview study. Challenges in safety analysis are discussed with special focus on increasing variance and user innovation concepts. By that our paper contributes to a better understanding of current and upcoming challenges in the domain of mechanical and mechatronic engineering and identifies the needs and directions for further research.