Living Safety Arguments for Open Systems

abstract

In recent years, there has been a shift from closed systems, with clearly defined borders, whose behavior is completely determined a priori, towards open systems. An open system is an independently developed system, which is able to communicate and cooperate with other open systems in an ad-hoc manner, at runtime. Moreover, due to their openness, such systems may be used in various contexts. Whenever open systems collaborate in a safety-critical context at runtime, the functional safety of both the individual open systems and emerged system of open systems needs to be assured. More and more regulations nowadays require a safety argumentation of the system. I thereby propose an approach for automatically adapting the safety argumentation built manually, during design time, according to the new operational environment information. To evaluate and validate the proposed solution, the approach will be applied to 1) a system of autonomous drones cooperating for intelligent intersection management, and 2) a system of cooperative transport robots in an industrial setting.