Human Control of Self-Organizing Safety Systems

In the context of Industry 4.0, production lines as part of Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) have specific demands for interoperability and flexibility. Machinery, being part of such production lines, has additional requirements in terms of functional safety. The re-configuration of functional safety systems, which is characterized by high manual configuration efforts, leads to time-intensive and expensive downtimes. The concept of self-organizing safety systems reduces the engineering efforts by assisting the system operator in the configuration of changes and consequently reducing machine downtime. The aim of this paper is to present a self-organizing safety system model and discuss the human control of self-organizing safety systems by making use of cybernetic approaches and examining the backgrounds for the need of human control over autonomous systems.