thomas-brunnengraeber.de

What It Is

The Thomas Brunnengräber website offers several engineering tools. The ones most relevant to developer tools and engineering computation are Functional Safety Suite 7.1 and ETCS Tool 2.2. The former is designed for quantitative risk assessment in functional safety, covering event trees, fault trees, Markov models, and reliability block diagrams. It also supports automatically converting safety-function architecture diagrams into fault trees. The latter focuses on ETCS train braking models, braking curves, and TSM limit calculations.

Core Capabilities and Tech Stack

A highlight of Functional Safety Suite is Monte Carlo simulation for fault trees. Version 7.1 expands beyond the previous NVIDIA GPU/Windows-only setup to support Intel and AMD CPUs/GPUs with OpenCL 2.1 and SPIR-V, and can model more complex behaviors such as diagnostics, recovery, sequencing, and standby. ETCS Tool 2.2 supports Gamma/Lambda models and Monte Carlo calculations related to prEN/EN17997-1. Charts can be exported as PNG/SVG, results as XML/CSV, and data is stored in XML text files. ETCS Tool requires Java JRE; on Windows, a bundled Temurin JRE version is provided, while some CPU simulations require GCC.

Pricing and Licensing

Functional Safety Suite is explicitly described as “not open source but free.” Full functionality requires applying for a license by email, with replies typically sent within three days. Without authorization, graphics, reports, some data exports, and conversions are restricted. ETCS Tool offers a Limited Edition, but commercial use requires contacting the author. The free version limits exports and the number of simulations, and does not support CUDA, meaning some high-level EBCL calculations cannot be completed. The public pages do not list commercial pricing or payment methods.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are its highly focused domain functionality, coverage of common functional safety analysis models, and practical attention to GPU/CPU acceleration and engineering file formats. ETCS Tool avoids proprietary binary files, which helps with review and archiving. The downsides are that the products are traditional desktop software, licensing depends on email communication, and there is no clear information on developer-friendly capabilities such as APIs/SDKs, automation integration, or CI workflows. ETCS commercial licensing and pricing are also not very transparent.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is better suited to professional engineers or researchers working on functional safety, reliability analysis, and railway ETCS braking models, rather than general software development teams. The main content does not provide information about access from mainland China, network stability, or payment methods, so these remain unknown. If licensing or downloads are unavailable, similar functional safety/reliability modeling software or open-source statistical simulation tools could be considered as alternatives, but specific options should be selected according to industry compliance requirements.