Plug-and-Produce... Safely!

To enable resilient, innovative, and sustainable industrialization, adopting the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) paradigm is essential, as it enables distributed, reconfigurable production environments. Fast reconfiguration, and hence flexibility, is further achieved by employing human-robot-collaborations - but this poses challenges with respect to human worker safety that currently assumes only static systems. While industrial practice is moving towards service-oriented approaches for the nominal function (producing goods), the safety assurance process is not yet ready for this new world that demands continuous, collaborative, on-demand assurance [21]. In this paper, we present an end-to-end model-based safety assurance lifecycle (using Conditional Safety Certificates [30]) to bring the assurance process closer to the demands of I4.0 and overcome this paradigm mismatch. We give details on the different steps of our approach and provide a worked example for an industrial human-robot-collaboration use case.