Dynamic Safety Contracts for Functional Cooperation of Automotive Systems

Going along with current research trends like Cyber-Physical Systems it is assumed for future embedded systems to enable a better interconnection of distributed systems. Besides mutual awareness, they should provide a deeper integration on the level of functional cooperation. By today, runtime aspects of system adaptation for functional safety are not sufficiently addressed. As predicted for the near future, especially collaboration scenarios of autonomous driving vehicles like platooning will make it necessary to address safety across the classical boundaries of single automotive systems. Therefore, extending the vehicle safety architecture to an open and adaptive one, implies that there is a need for a runtime assessment of safety. To ensure that the current operational situation based on cooperative functionalities is safe, we propose a safety evaluation with dynamic safety contracts between involved parties. The approach is based on a continuous monitoring, sharing and calculation of safety related quality characteristics of systems at runtime.