B-space: dynamic management and assurance of open systems of systems

Abstract

Connected cars, freely configurable operating rooms, or autonomous harvesting fleets: dynamically emerging open systems of systems will shape a new generation of systems opening up a vast potential for new kinds of applications. In light of the hard-to-predict structure and behavior of such systems, assuring their safety will require some disruptive changes of established safety paradigms. Combining current research results from different disciplines with industrial experience, this paper dares to think out of the box and look beyond the limits of traditional safety assurance. It structures upcoming challenges posed by the emergence of open systems of systems, tries to shift existing paradigms to meet those new challenges, and proposes an abstract conceptual framework building on comprehensive interlinked multi-concern runtime models for dynamically assuring the safety as well as other properties of open systems of systems. As there currently is no comprehensive realization of the framework, we discuss what kind of approaches could fit into which parts of the framework and exemplify this for the case of conditional safety certificates.