Challenges In Representing CPS Safety

This position paper describes the challenge of ensuring run-time safety in cyber-physical systems. The overarching problem is ensuring that computer-based systems will maintain safe operations even in the face of design-time and run-time faults. One way to address this problem is by creating an ability to perform run-time safety checks on CPS applications that can be used to record hazards, trigger emergency shutdowns (where doing so is safe), or perform other actions to minimize the consequences of an unsafe system behavior. Existing foundations for creating such a capability exist in the areas of software safety, temporal logic, model based diagnosis, and fault tolerance.