SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW OF SAFETY-RELATED CHALLENGES FOR AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS IN SAFETY-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS

An increased focus on the development of autonomous safety-critical systems requiresmore attention at ensuring safety of humans and the environment. The mainobjective of this thesis is to explore the state of the art and to identify the safetyrelatedchallenges being addressed for using autonomy in safety-critical systems. Inparticular, the thesis explores the nature of these challenges, the different autonomylevels they address and the type of safety measures as proposed solutions. Above all,we focus on the safety measures by a degree of adaptiveness, time of being activeand their ability of decision making. Collection of this information is performedby conducting a Systematic Literature Review of publications from the past 9 years.The results showed an increase in publications addressing challenges related to theuse of autonomy in safety-critical systems. We managed to identify four high-levelclasses of safety challenges. The results also indicate that the focus of research wason finding solutions for challenges related to full autonomous systems as well assolutions that are independent of the level of autonomy. Furthermore, consideringthe amount of publications, results show that non-learning solutions addressing theidentified safety challenges prevail over learning ones, active over passive solutionsand decisive over supportive solutions