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.