A safety roadmap to cyber-physical systems

In recent years, the term cyber-physical systems has emerged to characterize a new generation of embedded systems. In cyber-physical systems, embedded systems will be open in the sense that they will dynamically interconnect with other systems and will be able to dynamically adapt to changing runtime contexts. Such open adaptive systems provide a huge potential for society and for the economy. On the other hand, however, openness and adaptivity make it hard or even impossible for developers to predict a system's dynamic structure and behavior. This impedes the assurance of important system quality properties, especially safety and reliability. Safety assurance of cyber-physical systems will therefore be both one of the most urgent and one of the most challenging research questions of the next decade. This chapter analyzes the state of the art in order to identify open gaps and suggests a runtime safety assurance framework for cyber-physical systems to structure ongoing and future research activities.