Resilience-by-Design: Ontology-Driven differentiation of Resilience from Safety and Cybersecurity in the Context of Automotive Systems Engineering

The increasing complexity, connectivity, and autonomy of modern vehicles are transforming them into highly networked nodes within a comprehensive mobility system. Numerous control units, sensors, and cloud services interact simultaneously inside and outside the vehicle, pushing traditional architectural design to its limits. Complex driving functions, such as Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), require the interaction of distributed subsystems. Even a single disruption, whether mechanical, logical or cyber-physical, can trigger chain reactions and lead to safety-critical situations. To ensure availability and reliability of the overall system, resilience properties must be integrated into the system architecture as cross-cutting requirements from the early development stages. Resilience describes the ability of a system to maintain its intended functionality and reliability despite disruptive events. In both research and industry, resilience is frequently associated with safety or cybersecurity, giving rise to terms such as "cyber resilience This work aims to clearly define resilience as an independent system capability during the design phase, to establish a common understanding, and to enable its systematic integration into the automotive development process. We developed a cross-domain ontology that formally models the concepts and relationships of resilience, safety and cybersecurity. The ontology was developed iteratively through literature review, semi-automated term extraction, and expert discussions, and was subsequently validated by industry professionals in the automotive domain.