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Future embedded systems and services will be seamlessly connected and will interact on all levels with the infrastructure and cloud. For safety-critical applications this means that it is not sufficient to ensure dependability in a single embedded system, but it is necessary to cover the complete service chain including all involved embedded systems as well as involved services running in the edge or the cloud. However, for the development of such Cyber-Physical Systems-of-Systems (CPSoS) engineers must consider all kinds of dependability requirements. For example, it is not an option to ensure safety by impeding reliability or availability requirements. In fact, it is the engineers’ task to optimize the CPSoS’ performance without violating any safety goals.

Co-working and interaction of automated systems and humans in a warehouse is a significant challenge of progressing industrial systems’ autonomy. Especially, blind corners pose a critical scenario, in which infrastructure-based sensors can provide more safety. The automation of vehicles is usually tied to an argument on improved safety. However, current standards still rely on the awareness of humans to avoid collisions, which is limited at corners with occlusion. Based on the examination of blind corner scenarios in a warehouse, we derive the relevant critical situations. We propose an architecture that uses infrastructure sensors to prevent human-robot collisions at blind corners with respect to automated forklifts. This includes a safety critical function using wireless communication, which sporadically might be unavailable or disturbed. Therefore, the proposed architecture is able to mitigate these faults and gracefully degrades performance if required. Within our extensive evaluation, we use a warehouse simulation to verify our approach and to estimate the impact on an automated forklift’s performance.

The availability of functionality is a crucial aspect of mission- and safety-critical systems. This is for instance demonstrated by the pursuit to automate road transportation. Here, the driver is not obligated to be part of the control loop, thereby requiring the underlying system to remain operational even after a critical component failure. Advances in the field of mixed-criticality research have allowed to address this topic of fail-operational system behaviour more efficiently. For instance, general purpose computing platforms may relinquish the need for dedicated backup units, as their purpose can be redefined at runtime. Based on this, a deterministic and resource-efficient reconfiguration mechanism is developed, in order to address safety concerns with respect to availability in a generic manner. To find a configuration for this mechanism that can ensure all availability-related safety properties, a design-time method to automatically generate schedules for different modes of operations from declaratively defined requirements is established. To cope with the inherent computational complexity, heuristics are developed to effectively narrow the problem space. Subsequently, this method’s applicability and scalability are respectively evaluated qualitatively within an automotive case study and quantitatively by means of a tool performance analysis.

Mit dem von Fraunhofer ESK entwickelten Werkzeugprototypen können Entwickler die Einhaltung von Richtlinien bei der Modellierung von Softwaremodellen künftig verlässlicher, umfassender und schneller prüfen. Das Programm umfasst sowohl derzeit gängige Methoden für die Validierung von Softwaremodellen als auch Mechanismen für die Prüfung von Modellierungsrichtlinien: Ein modularer Richtlinienkatalog, Profile mit unterschiedlichen Regelanforderungen und die Konfiguration einzelner Regeln erlauben eine Anpassung an die aktuelle Modellierungsaufgabe. Dazu kommen Möglichkeiten zur Dokumentation und automatisierten Korrektur von gefundenen Problemen.