Systematic composition of services from distributed systems for highly dynamic collaboration processes

Abstract

Establishing collaboration processes of systems in an open and dynamically changing environment like the automotive domain will inescapably lead to a varying availability of shared services. A vivid example is driving in a platoon, where smaller distances between vehicles are made possible due to additional safety related runtime guarantees provided by surrounding vehicles. In such collaboration scenarios environmental conditions can change, driving behavior from surrounding vehicles may not be adequate or hardware/software failure of involved systems may occur. For safety critical use cases like platooning, such degraded or even missing collaboration capabilities can rapidly lead to hazardous situations due to the highly dynamic context. When such events occur, only an immediate and situation adapted reaction behavior can prevent physical or material damage. For the certification of such described dynamic collaboration processes, it is therefore essential to develop a conclusive safety concept for each individual system, which also considers the return to a safe mode. The presented “Dynamic Safety Contracts” approach enables a systematic composition of available services at runtime to extend or reduce allowed degrees of freedom for a system involved in a dynamic collaboration scenario.