2nd Workshop on Architecting Safety in Collaborative Mobile Systems (ASCoMS), Toulouse, France, September 2013
Developing smart vehicles, either automobile or aerial, to realise cooperative
functionality in open and inherently uncertain environments is a difficult
task. One fundamental challenge is to make cooperation predictable and safe,
despite the uncertainties affecting the operation. Traditional approaches for the
design of safe control systems rely on the possibility of defining safe operational
bounds, both in the value and in the temporal domain. Unfortunately, when considering
wireless communication networks and varying sources of sensor data, it
becomes very hard, or even impossible, to define safe and small enough bounds.
To deal with this problem, a possible approach is to consider a hybrid system architecture
in which some components may execute with uncertain timeliness, but
which also includes some predictable components. In addition, a Safety Kernel
implemented in the predictable part of the system will be instrumental to manage
the system behaviour and ensure safety.
In this paper, we describe the architecture and role of such Safety Kernel in the
context of a hybrid system architecture. The Safety Kernel is responsible for monitoring
and managing the run time configuration of the system, as needed to avoid
hazardous situations. We specify the individual components of the Safety Kernel
and how they interact with other components in the system architecture, including
the functional components of the control system. Finally we present a high-level
description of a concrete implementation based on time and space partitioning.
@inproceedings{Costa:13a, author = {Pedro N{\'o}brega Da Costa and Jo{\~a}o Craveiro and Ant[\'o}nio Casimiro and Jos{\'e} Rufino}, title = {Safety Kernel for Cooperative Sensor-Based Systems}, booktitle = {Workshop on Architecting Safety in Collaborative Mobile Systems (ASCoMS'13), Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security}, year = {2013}, month = sep, address = {Toulouse, France}, url = {http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/SAFECOMP2013-ASCOMS/hal-00847903}, abstractURL = {http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~casim/papers/ascoms13/ascoms13.htm}, documentURL = {http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~casim/papers/ascoms13/ascoms13.pdf}, }