Workshop on Architecting Safety in Collaborative Mobile Systems ASCoMS

This volume contains the papers presented at ASCoMS 2014 the 3rd Workshop on Architecting Safety in Collaborative Mobile Systems held on September 8, 2014 in Firenze as part of SAFECOMP Conference 2014. As for the two previous years the workshop was held at SAFECOMP. 

ASCoMS 2014 focuses on fundamental challenges in ensuring that safety requirements are satisfied despite the increased system complexity and the uncertainties introduced by operation in open and not well defined environments, motivated by new systems of systems that will be established in the era of Cyber-Physical Systems. 

New and improved sensor and communication technologies create opportunities for designing embedded and mobile systems that are able to interact with their environment, and exhibit smart and autonomous behavior. Furthermore, collaboration between mobile entities can also be envisaged for improving their functionality as well as performance. Example applications include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and smart cars, where for instance, UAVs can be used for environmental surveillance and control, and smart vehicles coordinating their behaviors can be used to increase traffic throughput and improve mobility without the need of using more space for the respective traffic infrastructures. 

A fundamental challenge is then to ensure that safety requirements are satisfied despite the increased system complexity and the uncertainties introduced by the operation in open and not well defined environments. In general, the problem might be equated in terms of achieving system safety for potentially mass consumer products. From an application perspective, the workshop focuses on distributed and cooperative safety-critical systems. So far, the existing solutions are still insufficient or inadequate and therefore these systems are not allowed to operate in the public air space or on public roads because the risk of causing severe damage or even threaten human lives cannot be excluded with sufficient certainty. This justifies the importance of research in this area, and explains the interest on the subject by the academia and the industry. 

The papers for ASCoMS 2014 consider different aspects of future mobile systems and their safety concerns, including communication and performance adaptation aspects, safety constraints and verification, to collaborative development and ITS design perspectives. 

---