Safety assurance is a paramount factor in the large-scale deployment of various autonomous systems (e.g., self-driving vehicles). However, the execution of safety engineering practices and processes have been challenged by an increasing complexity of modern safety-critical systems. This attribute has become more critical for autonomous systems that involve artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven techniques along with the complex interactions of the physical world and digital computing platforms. In this position paper, we highlight some challenges of applying current safety processes to modern autonomous systems. Then, we introduce the concept of SafetyOps - a set of practices, which combines DevOps, TestOps, DataOps, and MLOps to provide an efficient, continuous and traceable system safety lifecycle. We believe that SafetyOps can play a significant role in scalable integration and adaptation of safety engineering into various industries relying on AI and data.
Fully autonomous vehicles (AVs), i.e., AVs with autonomy level 5, are expected to dominate road transportation in the near-future and contribute trillions of dollars to the global economy. The general public, government organizations, and manufacturers all have significant concern regarding resiliency and safety standards of the autonomous driving system (ADS) of AVs . In this work, we proposed and developed (a) `Kayotee' - a fault injection-based tool to systematically inject faults into software and hardware components of the ADS to assess the safety and reliability of AVs to faults and erro…
This report documents safety assurance argument templates to support the deployment and operation of autonomous systems that include machine learning (ML) components. The document presents example safety argument templates covering: the development of safety requirements, hazard analysis, a safety monitor architecture for an autonomous system including at least one ML element, a component with ML and the adaptation and change of the system over time. The report also presents generic templates for argument defeaters and evidence confidence that can be used to strengthen, review, and adapt the t…
A Verification Methodology for Safety Assurance of Robotic Autonomous Systems
Faculty of Science and Technology, Norwegian University Of Life Sciences (NMBU)（科学与技术学院，挪威生命科学大学）；Department of Mechatronics, University of Agder (UiA)（机械电子系，阿格德大学）；Department of Computer Science, University Of York, UK（计算机科学系，约克大学（英国））
The European Machinery Directive and related harmonized standards do consider that software is used to generate safety-relevant behavior of the machinery but do not consider all kinds of software. In particular, software based on machine learning (ML) are not considered for the realization of safety-relevant behavior. This limits the introduction of suitable safety concepts for autonomous mobile robots and other autonomous machinery, which commonly depend on ML-based functions. We investigated this issue and the way safety standards define safety measures to be implemented against software fau…
There is an increasing necessity to deploy autonomous systems in highly heterogeneous, dynamic environments, e.g. service robots in hospitals or autonomous cars on highways. Due to the uncertainty in these environments, the verification results obtained with respect to the system and environment models at design-time might not be transferable to the system behavior at run time. For autonomous systems operating in dynamic environments, safety of motion and collision avoidance are critical requirements. With regard to these requirements, Macek et al. [6] define the passive safety property, which…
The acceptance of autonomous vehicles is dependent on the rigorous assessment of their safety. Furthermore, the commercial viability of AV programs depends on the ability to estimate the time and resources required to achieve desired safety levels. Naive approaches to estimating the reliability and safety levels of autonomous vehicles under development are will require infeasible amounts of testing of a static vehicle configuration. To permit both the estimation of current safety, and make predictions about the reliability of future systems, I propose the use of a standard tool for modelling t…
UniSTPA: A Safety Analysis Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
National Key Laboratory of Automotive Chassis Integration and Bionics, Jilin University, Changchun, China（吉林大学汽车底盘集成与仿生国家级重点实验室）；School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot‐Watt University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom（赫瑞-沃森大学工程与物理科学学院）
Self-driving Autonomous Vehicles (SAVs) are gaining more interest each passing day by the industry as well as the general public. Tech and automobile companies are investing huge amounts of capital in research and development of SAVs to make sure they have a head start in the SAV market in the future. One of the major hurdles in the way of SAVs making it to the public roads is the lack of confidence of public in the safety aspect of SAVs. In order to assure safety and provide confidence to the public in the safety of SAVs, researchers around the world have used coverage-based testing for Verif…
