Editorial for the special issue on the International Workshop on Autonomous System Safety (IWASS)

Assessing and demonstrating Safety of Autonomous Systems is not a trivial task. It poses several challenges and requires covering aspects related to hardware, software, humans, the environment, and their interactions, in addition to legislation, society, and ethics. The International Workshop on Autonomous System Safety (IWASS) aims at identifying research directions and solutions for addressing these challenges. IWASS’ first edition was held in 2019 in Trondheim, Norway, followed by a second edition in 2021 in an online format. IWASS 2019 and 2021 gathered each around 50 invited experts from various parts of the world on topics concerning autonomous systems safety from academia, industry, and governmental agencies. The two editions of IWASS focused on critical issues for autonomous systems safety, namely: (i) Demonstrating safety of autonomous systems – verification and validation (V&V), and risk acceptance, (ii) human in or on the loop – the role of humans in autonomous systems operations, (iii) modeling and simulation for understanding complexity and cascading failures, and (iv) artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics for resilient autonomous systems. This special issue of the Journal of Risk and Reliability aims to provide a venue for researchers to extend and share scientific contributions to the topics addressed during IWASS. The papers in this special issue portray IWASS’ wide range of discussed issues, as well as the represented industries and application areas. They complement IWASS’ discussions, as described below.