I came, I saw, I certified: some perspectives on the safety assurance of cyber-physical systems
This is an incremental perspective on improving safety certification for critical systems like autonomous vehicles, aimed at regulators and developers.
The paper addresses the challenge of developing compelling safety assurance cases for cyber-physical systems to prevent failures that could cause life loss or damage, by exploring enablers like detecting deficits and automating generation without presenting specific results or numbers.
The execution failure of cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous driving systems, unmanned aerial systems, and robotic systems) could result in the loss of life, severe injuries, large-scale environmental damage, property destruction, and major economic loss. Hence, such systems usually require a strong justification that they will effectively support critical requirements (e.g., safety, security, and reliability) for which they were designed. Thus, it is often mandatory to develop compelling assurance cases to support that justification and allow regulatory bodies to certify such systems. In such contexts, detecting assurance deficits, relying on patterns to improve the structure of assurance cases, improving existing assurance case notations, and (semi-)automating the generation of assurance cases are key to develop compelling assurance cases and foster consumer acceptance. We therefore explore challenges related to such assurance enablers and outline some potential directions that could be explored to tackle them.