Safety assurance of open adaptive systems - a survey

Open adaptive systems are the basis for a promising new generation of embedded systems with huge economic potential. In many application domains, however, the systems are safety-critical and an appropriate safety assurance approach is still missing. In recent years, models at runtime have emerged as a promising way to systematically engineer adaptive systems. This approach seems to provide the indispensable leverage for applying safety assurance techniques in adaptive systems. Therefore, this survey analyzes the state-of-the-art of models at runtime from a safety engineering point of view in order to assess the potential of this approach and to identify open gaps that have to be closed in future research to yield a safety assurance approach for open adaptive systems.