A safe generic adaptation mechanism for smart cars

Today's vehicles are evolving towards smart cars, which will be able to drive autonomously and adapt to changing contexts. Incorporating self-adaptation in these cyber-physical systems (CPS) promises great benefits, like cheaper software-based redundancy or optimised resource utilisation. As promising as these advantages are, a respective proportion of a vehicle's functionality poses as safety hazards when confronted with fault and failure situations. Consequently, a system's safety has to be ensured with respect to the availability of multiple software applications, thus often resulting in redundant hardware resources, such as dedicated backup control units. To benefit from self-adaptation by means of creating efficient and safe systems, this work introduces a safety concept in form of a generic adaptation mechanism (GAM). In detail, this generic adaptation mechanism is introduced and analysed with respect to generally known and newly created safety hazards, in order to determine a minimal set of system properties and architectural limitations required to safely perform adaptation. Moreover, the approach is applied to the ICT architecture of a smart e-car, thereby highlighting the soundness, general applicability, and advantages of this safety concept and forming the foundation for the currently ongoing implementation of the GAM within a real prototype vehicle.