Safety Assurance for Emergent Collaboration of Open Distributed Systems

For the next generation of distributed systems it is foreseen to enable new powerful applications based on system collaboration for dynamic integration of functionalities. This requires a certain level of autonomy for self-managing systems to change their effective and deterministic behavior during operation. In many application domains, however, collaboration processes for new higher-level functionalities are safety critical and an appropriate safety assurance approach is still missing. To ensure that the current operational situation based on an adapted system behavior 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. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with a use case from the automotive domain.