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.