Now showing 1 - 10 of 46
  • Publication
    Managing Uncertainty of AI-based Perception for Autonomous Systems
    ( 2019)
    Henne, Maximilian
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    With the advent of autonomous systems, machine perception is a decisive safety-critical part to make such systems become reality. However, presently used AI-based perception does not meet the required reliability for usage in real-world systems beyond prototypes, as for autonomous cars. In this work, we describe the challenge of reliable perception for autonomous systems. Furthermore, we identify methods and approaches to quantify the uncertainty of AI-based perception. Along with dynamic management of the safety, we show a path to how uncertainty information can be utilized for the perception, so that it will meet the high dependability demands of life-critical autonomous systems.
  • Publication
    Towards Dynamic Safety Management for Autonomous Systems
    Safety assurance of autonomous systems is one of the current key challenges of safety engineering. Given the specific characteristics of autonomous systems, we need to deal with many uncertainties making it difficult or even impossible to predict the system's behaviour in all potential operational situations. Simply using established static safety approaches would result in very strict worst-case assumptions making the development of autonomous systems at reasonable costs impossible. This paper therefore introduces the idea of dynamic safety management. Using dynamic safety management enables a system to assess its safety and to self-optimize its performance at runtime. Considering the current risk related to the actual context at runtime instead of being bound to strict worst-case assumptions provides the essential basis for the development of safe and yet cost-efficient autonomous systems.
  • Publication
    Rapid Innovation Toolkit for the development of dependable cooperative applications
    ( 2018)
    Seydel, Dominique
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    Cooperative applications have an enormous potential to improve future mobility systems. Though, special challenges regarding safety and security arise out of the connectivity and the distribution of the application among heterogeneous systems. These include expensive and time-consuming development and test phases. Especially, the debugging of an application, whose sub-functions are located on heterogeneous and partially mobile systems, requires a new kind of testing environment. The test and validation of the overall application is complex, as the wireless link implies varying timing behaviour and less data confidence. For this purpose, the proposed testbed integrates the DANA (""Description and Analysis of Networked Applications"") Framework to achieve a central overview of the overall application and the behaviour of all systems involved. This software tool kit is able to find deviations from the specified behaviour and also it can instantly locate and identify erroneous functions. In this paper, we present a solution for the complete development cycle of cooperative automotive systems together with an exemplary development flow for safety and security testing.
  • Publication
    Towards integrating undependable self-adaptive systems in safety-critical environments
    Modern cyber-physical systems (CPS) integrate more and more powerful computing power to master novel applications and adapt to changing situations. A striking example is the recent progression in the automotive market towards autonomous driving. Powerful artificial intelligent algorithms must be executed on high performant parallelized platforms. However, this cannot be employed in a safe way, as the platforms stemming from the consumer electronics (CE) world still lack required dependability and safety mechanisms. In this paper, we present a concept to integrate undependable self-adaptive subsystems into safety-critical environments. For this, we introduce self-adaptation envelopes which manage undependable system parts and integrate within a dependable system. We evaluate our approach by a comprehensive case study of autonomous driving. Thereby, we show that the potential failures of the AUTOSAR Adaptive platform as exemplary undependable system can be handled by our concept. In overall, we outline a way of integrating inherently undependable adaptive systems into safety-critical CPS.
  • Publication
    A Rapid Innovation Framework for Connected Mobility Applications
    (Fraunhofer ESK, 2018)
    Pöhn, Daniela
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    Seydel, Dominique
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    Freese-Wagner, Manuela
    Connected Mobility Applications help to continuously improve traffic safety and efficiency. Today, much time and effort have to be invested to bring an idea into a safe prototype and to finally launch a reliable product.Software development tools have to adapt to these requirements. They have to support a rapid and continuous development process, that allows to test and validate the distributed application as one overall system. When developing cooperative applications, a higher design complexity has to be handled, as components are distributed over heterogeneous systems that interact with a varying timing behavior and less data confidence. Also, test and validation become more complex. Our Innovation Framework is intended to rapidly bring an idea for a connected application into a prototype so the investment risk for innovative applications is reduced. In this whitepaper we describe the approach of a Rapid InnovationTool Kit that is intended to speed up the development process for connected mobility applications. Thereby, a safe and secure prototype is available at an early development phase to gain experience within field tests that help to rapidly improve the intended application. Our software tool kit is able to find deviations from the specified behaviour and also it can instantly locate and identify erroneous functions within distributed systems. Extensive security tests can then be applied on the implemented application to ensure a secure operation. Another use case for the described testbed is to evaluate communication technologies and to find the most suitable transmission technology for a certain application. For example, short range communication with the 802.11p WLAN technology or the upcoming LTE enhancement LTE-V2X are comparable within specific scenarios. This evaluation can help to reduce the investment risk for the deployment of connected applications.
  • Publication
    Resumption of runtime verification monitors: Method, approach and application
    ( 2018) ; ;
    Bauer, Bernhard
    Runtime verification checks if the behavior of a system under observation in a certain run satisfies a given correctness property. While a positive description of the system's behavior is often available from specification, it contains no information for the monitor how it should continue in case the system deviates from this behavior. If the monitor does not resume its operation in the right way, test coverage will be unnecessarily low or further observations are misclassified. To close this gap, we present a new method for extending state-based runtime monitors in an automated way, called resumption. Therefore, this paper examines how runtime verification monitors based on a positive behavior description can be resumed to find all detectable deviations instead of reporting only invalid traces. Moreover, we examine when resumption can be applied successfully and we present alternative resumption algorithms. Using an evaluation framework, their precision and recall for detecting different kinds of deviations are compared. While the algorithm seeking expected behavior for resumption works very well in all evaluated cases, the framework can also be used to find the best suited resumption extension for a specific application scenario. Further, two real world application scenarios are introduced where resumption has been successfully applied.
  • Publication
    Towards safety-awareness and dynamic safety management
    Future safety-critical systems will be highly automated or even autonomous and they will dynamically cooperate with other systems as part of a comprehensive ecosystem. This together with increasing utilization of artificial intelligence introduces uncertainties on different levels, which detriment the application of established safety engineering methods and standards. These uncertainties might be tackled by making systems safety-aware and enabling them to manage themselves accordingly. This paper introduces a corresponding conceptual dynamic safety management framework incorporating monitoring facilities and runtime safety-models to create safety-awareness. Based on this, planning and execution of safe system optimizations can be carried out by means of self-adaptation. We illustrate our approach by applying it for the dynamic safety assurance of a single car.
  • Publication
    Safety & security testing of cooperative automotive systems
    ( 2018)
    Seydel, Dominique
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    Pöhn, Daniela
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    Cooperative behavior of automated traffic participants is one next step towards the goals of reducing the number of traffic fatalities and optimizing traffic flow. The notification of a traffic participant's intentions and coordination of driving strategies increase the reaction time for safety functions and allow a foresighted maneuver planning. When developing cooperative applications, a higher design complexity has to be handled, as components are distributed over heterogeneous systems that interact with a varying timing behavior and less data confidence. In this paper, we present a solution for the development, simulation and validation of cooperative automotive systems together with an exemplary development flow for safety and security testing.
  • Publication
    Evaluation of Traffic Control Systems as ITS Infrastructure for Automated Driving
    ( 2018)
    Franze, Juliane
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    Seydel, Dominique
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    Haspel, Ulrich
    Vehicles with automated driving systems require more sensor information about their environment than non-automated vehicles. Detection with camera, lidar or other sensors is already state of the art in newer vehicles. As of today though, they only work in close proximity and lack the incorporation of existing traffic information from local authorities. In this paper, we present a novel way of providing traffic management information to vehicles, sent directly from Road Authorities. We use existing ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) infrastructure and assess how information on traffic control and reroutes, displayed on variable message signs, can be used as sensory input for vehicles. We examine real world data from a South German Road Authority. The evaluation of latency, reliability and integrity of traffic information has been conducted end-to-end as well as between the six stations that are involved. We show the general feasibility of our proposal and discuss which obstacles need to be overcome for a wider use in other road systems.
  • Publication
    Safe adaptation for reliable and energy-efficient E/E architectures
    ( 2017) ; ; ;
    Ruiz, Alejandra
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    Radermacher, Ansgar
    The upcoming changing mobility paradigms request more and more services and features to be included in future cars. Electric mobility and highly automated driving lead to new requirements and demands on vehicle information and communication (ICT) architectures. For example, in the case of highly automated driving, future drivers no longer need to monitor and control the vehicle all the time. This calls for new fault-tolerant approaches of automotive E/E architectures. In addition, the electrification of vehicles requires a flexible underlying E/E architecture which facilitates enhanced energy management. Within the EU-funded SafeAdapt project, a new E/E architecture for future vehicles has been developed in which adaptive systems ensure safe, reliable, and cost-effective mobility. The holistic approach provides the necessary foundation for future invehicle systems and its evaluation shows the great potential of such reliable and energy-efficient E/E architectures.