Transportation CPS Safety Challenges

Abstract — Creating safe Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) presents new challenges as autonomous operation is attempted in unconstrained operational environments. The extremely high safety level required of such systems (perhaps one critical failure per billion operating hours) means that validation approaches will need to consider not only normal operation, but also operation with system faults and in exceptional environments. Additional challenges will need to be overcome in the areas of rigorously defining safety requirements, trusting the safety of multi-vendor distributed system components, tolerating environmental uncertainty, providing a realistic role for human oversight, and ensuring sufficiently rigorous validation of autonomy technology. Keywords—Cyber-Physical System (CPS) safety; ultra-dependable systems; software safety; autonomous vehicles I