Towards dependability engineering of cooperative automotive cyber-physical systems

Numerous industrial sectors are investing in Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS). CPS provide their functionality by the interaction of various subsystems which are usually developed by different suppliers and are expected to cooperate safely. The open and cooperative nature of CPS poses a significant challenge for industrial sectors with stringent dependability constraints, such as, autonomous automobile systems, medical monitoring, process control systems, or automatic pilot avionics. As CPS may reconfigure itself during run-time, for instance in order to handle failures or to adapt on changing conditions (such as connected car features relying on availability of environmental information), the dependability of this adaptation must still be ensured. To tackle this assurance issue, several recommendations rely on a set of contracts to describe components attributes and evaluate the robustness of the configuration at run-time. In our research project, DEIS, we address these important and unsolved challenges by developing technologies for dependable system integration at run-time. At the core of these technologies lies the concept of a Digital Dependability Identity (DDI) of a component or system. DDIs are composable and executable in-the-field, facilitating (a) efficient synthesis of component and system dependability information over the supply chain and (b) effective evaluation of this information in-the-field for safe and secure composition of highly distributed and autonomous CPS. In contrast to other approaches mainly focusing on software specifics (such as SOME/IP or other SoA approaches), DDI focuses on system development level (also taking into account HW specifics and system decomposition). The paper is describing the approach focusing on the support for functional safety and validation of automated and connected vehicles, by providing an initial framework to manage dependability aspects.