Multi-Agent Optimization for Safety Analysis of Cyber-Physical Systems: Position Paper
This addresses safety analysis challenges for engineers designing complex cyber-physical systems, but it appears incremental as it extends classical FMECA with optimization techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of manually managing trade-offs between safety and development constraints in Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) for complex cyber-physical systems, proposing a multi-agent optimization method to automate decision-making and offer optimal solutions.
Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) is one of the safety analysis methods recommended by most of the international standards. The classical FMECA is made in a form of a table filled in either manually or by using safety analysis tools. In both cases, the design engineers have to choose the trade-offs between safety and other development constraints. In the case of complex cyber-physical systems (CPS) with thousands of specified constraints, this may lead to severe problems and significantly impact the overall criticality of CPS. In this paper, we propose to adopt optimization techniques to automate the decision making process conducted after FMECA of CPS. We describe a multi-agent based optimization method which extends classical FMECA for offering optimal solutions in terms of criticality and development constraints of CPS.