The SafetyConsumerID allows for discrimination between RequestSPDUs and ResponseSPDUs belonging to different SafetyConsumers. It is mainly used for diagnostic purposes, such as detecting unintentional concurrent access of a single SafetyProvider by multiple SafetyConsumers. Safety-related communication errors which are detected by checking the SafetyConsumerID would also be detected by other mechanisms, including the MNR, the SafetyProviderID, and the SafetyConsumerTimeout.

From a safety point of view, there are no qualitative requirements regarding the generation or administration of the SafetyConsumerID. It may be assigned during engineering, commissioning, at startup, and may even change during runtime. It is not required to check for uniqueness of SafetyConsumerIDs.

However, assigning identical SafetyConsumerIDs to multiple consumers is not recommended because fault localization can become more difficult.