Internet of Things and Safety Assurance of Cooperative Cyber-Physical Systems: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

The rise of artificial intelligence in parallel with the fusion of the physical and digital worlds is sustained by the development and progressive adoption of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Cooperative and autonomous CPSs have been shown to have significant economic and societal potential in numerous domains, where human lives and the environment are at stake. To unlock the full potential of such systems, it is necessary to improve stakeholders' confidence in such systems, by providing safety assurances. Due to the open and adaptive nature of such systems, special attention was invested in the runtime assurance, based on the real-time monitoring of the system behaviour. IoT-enabled multi-agent systems have been widely used for different types of monitoring applications. In this paper, we discuss the opportunities for applying IoT-based solutions for the cooperative CPSs safety assurance through an illustrative example. Future research directions have been drawn based on the identification of the current challenges.