20160421_154207SafeCOP, a new European project , started 1st of April 2016 and had its kick-off meeting in Milan at the end of of the same month.

The project, with its extensive name Safe Cooperating Cyber-Physical Systems using Wireless Communication, will establish a safety assurance approach, a platform architecture, and tools for cost-efficient and practical certification of cooperating cyber-physical systems (CO-CPS). There is currently in fact no certification practice for CO-CPS, where systems from several manufacturers have to interact wirelessly.

The project targets systems that are of 3 types:

  1. Systems that use inter-system communication to reach a common goal (examples…)
  2. Systems that rely on communicated information from other systems in order to ensure safe and/or efficient operation (e.g. vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) cooperation for traffic management)
  3. Systems that provide services that may compromise safety if the communication fails (e.g. vehicles and roadside units interaction)

An important feature of these systems is that they can successfully address several societal challenges, that they use wireless communication, they have multiple stakeholders, dynamic system definitions and unpredictable operating environments.

To appreciate the impact of this project, consider that when a system might harm humans or the environment (or is intended to mitigate or manage such harm), a safety assurance evidence about how to manage the risk has to be released prior to its use. This pre-release (design-time) evidence anticipates the possible situations that might arise between the system and its environment, and it shows that they are not risky. Developing certifications is generally very expensive and can add a development cost overhead of 25 to 100%. At the same time, while safety-aware design and safety assurance are required, no single manufacturer has currently design authority over or responsibility for the safety of cooperative embedded systems. It is exactly in this context that SafeCOP will operate: it will develop a safety-assurance framework for CO-CPS that will, in turn, facilitate their certification and market release at affordable costs.

The project will also develop a specific “Runtime Manager” architecture to support the engineering and certification of CO-CPS. This architecture will detect – at runtime – abnormal behaviors and trigger, when needed, a safe degraded mode. SafeCOP will evaluate the adequacy of standard wireless technologies for CO-CPS and will propose a “safety application layer” on top of the existing protocols to ensure safe and secure cooperation. Doing so, SafeCOP will contribute to new standards and regulations , that is it will provide the certification authorities and standardization committees with scientifically validated solutions that can be extended to address cooperation and system-of-systems issues. Given that the results are relevant for many industrial application areas,  the impact of the project will be shown in 5 different real-world applications (automotive, weather forecasting, healthcare and maritime).

SafeCOP kick-off in April 2016, Milan (Italy)

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