Analyzing hazards in system-of-systems: Described in a quarry site automation context

Methods for analyzing hazards related to individual systems are well studied and established in industry today. When system-of-systems are set up to achieve new emergent behavior, hazards specifically caused by malfunctioning behavior of the complex interactions between the involved systems may not be revealed by just analyzing single system hazards. A structured process is required to reduce the complexity to enable identification of hazards when designing system-of-systems. In this paper we first present how hazards are identified and analyzed using hazard and risk assessment (HARA) methodology by the industry in the context of single systems. We describe systems-of-systems and provide a quarry site automation example from the construction equipment domain. We propose a new structured process for identifying potential hazards in systems-of-systems (HISoS), exemplified in the context of the provided example. Our approach helps to streamline the hazard analysis process in an efficient manner thus helping faster certification of system-of-systems.