17th European Dependable Computing Conference
13-16 September 2021
Munich, Germany

Workshops

For DREAMS, DSOGRI, SERENE and CARS workshops


DREAMS - Dynamic Risk managEment for Autonomous Systems

Organizers: Rasmus Adler, Daniel Schneider (Fraunhofer IESE, Germany), Phillip Schleiß, Simon Burton (Fraunhofer IKS, Germany)

Autonomous systems have enormous potential and they are bound to be a major driver in future economical and societal transformations. Their key trait is that they pursue and achieve their more or less explicitly defined goals independently and without human guidance or intervention. In contexts where safety, or other critical properties, need to be guaranteed it is, however, presently hardly possible to exploit autonomous systems to their full potential. Unknowns and uncertainties are induced due to high complexity of the autonomous behaviors, the utilized technology and the volatile and highly complex system contexts. These characteristics render the base assumptions of established assurance methodologies (and standards) void, hence new approaches need to be investigated. One general approach to deal with such unknowns and uncertainties is to shift parts of the development time assurance activities into runtime when all required information can be resolved.

Giving systems runtime assurance capabilities means empowering them to monitor their environments (i.e. other collaborating systems as well as the physical environment), analyze and reason about implications regarding key safety requirements, and, execute control actions to ensure adherence to these requirements at any time – thus conducting Dynamic Risk Management (DRM). DRM has the potential to not only outright enable certain types of systems or applications, but also to significantly increase the performance of already existing ones. This is due to the fact that by resolving unknowns and uncertainties at runtime it will be possible to get rid of worst case assumptions that typically detriment the systems performance properties. The DREAMS workshop intends to explore concepts and techniques for realizing DRM. It invites experts, researchers, and practitioners for presentations and in-depth discussions about prediction models for risk identification, integration between strategic, tactical and operational risk management, architectures for dynamic risk management, and V&V of dynamic risk management.

DREAMS aims at bringing together communities from diverse disciplines, such as safety engineering, runtime adaptation, predictive modelling, control theory, and from different application domains such as automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture and critical infrastructures.

Website: https://www.iese.fraunhofer.de/en/seminare_training/edcc2020-workshop.html

Important Dates:

  • Paper Submission: June 21, 2021
  • Author notification: June 29, 2021
  • WS Camera-Ready Papers: July 5, 2021

DSOGRI - Dependable Solutions for Intelligent Electricity Distribution Grid

Organizers: Nicola Nostro (Resiltech s.r.l., Italy), Rasmus Løvenstein Olsen, Hans-Peter Schwefel (Aalborg University, Denmark)

Electrical distribution grids are required to deliver an increasingly more efficient and reliable supply of electricity to end users while supporting also a higher penetration of renewable energy resources. This increased penetration of renewable energy resources as well as the use of increasingly connected intelligent meters, inverters, electrical vehicle represent a challenge for reliability. For this purpose, Distribution System Operators (DSOs) need to implement intelligent solutions capable of guaranteeing a high level of resilience to their systems by offering new functionalities as for example prompt identification and localization of faults and diagnosis. Such solutions are based in communication technologies, ICT infrastructures, data collection and management, which create the basis for obtaining intelligent, reliable and efficient distribution grids. Despite these functionalities offers a more effective and successful management of electricity distribution, they also introduce a level of interdependence between the ICT infrastructure and the electricity grid, as well as potential cyber-security vulnerabilities, that must be managed.

The purpose of this workshop is to investigate issues related to the ICT-based management of failures, including cyber-security aspects, the ability to quantify the quality of the data collected from the sub-systems deployed in the field, in order to make an appropriate diagnosis and detection. Moreover, the workshop provides a forum for researchers and engineers in academia and industry for discussing and analyzing current solutions and approaches, research results, experiences, and products in the field of intelligent electricity grids. Its ultimate goal is to presents the advancement on the state of art in this domain and spreading their adoption in several scenarios involving main DSOs of the power domain.

Website: http://www.dsogri.eu/

Important Dates:

  • Paper Submission: June 5, 2021
  • Author notification: June 29, 2021
  • WS Camera-Ready Papers: July 5, 2021

SERENE - Software Engineering for Resilient Systems

Organizers: Amleto Di Salle (University of L'Aquila, Italy), Amel Bennaceur (Open University, United Kingdom)

Resilient systems withstand, recover from, and adapt to disruptive changes with acceptable degradation in their provided services. Resilience is particularly remarkable for modern software and software-controlled systems, many of which are required to continually adapt their architecture and parameters in response to evolving requirements, customer feedback, new business needs, platform upgrades, etc. Despite frequent changes and disruptions, the software is expected to function correctly and reliably. This is particularly important for software systems that provide services which are critical to society, e.g., in transportation, healthcare, energy production and e-government. Since modern software should be developed to cope with changes, unforeseen failures and malicious cyber-attacks efficiently, design for resilience is an increasingly important area of software engineering.

The SERENE workshop aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry, to advance the state-of-the-art and to identify open challenges in the software engineering of resilient systems.

Website: http://serene.disim.univaq.it/2021/index.html

Important Dates:

  • Abstract Submission: June 23, 2021
  • Paper Submission: June 30, 2021
  • Author notification: July 16, 2021
  • WS Camera-Ready Papers: July 23, 2021

CARS - Critical Automotive Applications: Robustness & Safety

Organizers:
Rolf Johansson (Astus AB, Sweden), Jean-Charles Fabre (LAAS-CNRS, France), Mario Trapp (Fraunhofer IKS, Germany)

The increasing complexity of automotive applications, the challenges posed by autonomous vehicles, the need to master production costs using off-the-shelf components, the coexistence of critical and non-critical applications, and the emergence of new architectural paradigms may have a strong effect on dependability of automotive embedded systems. This situation requires design and validation methods, but also tools to improve automotive systems robustness and their safety and security properties.

The evolution of automotive systems is supported by standards (like AUTOSAR, ISO26262) that respectively advocate a software architecture but also recommend development approaches to improve system robustness and safety. The fast evolution of both standards is a reality to incorporate novel features, more flexibility while improving robustness, security and safety.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in the construction of critical automotive applications and systems. It will place emphasis on:

  • dependability issues,
  • software engineering for robustness,
  • security and safety issues,
  • real-time embedded systems technologies,
  • architectural software and hardware solutions,
  • development processes for dependable automotive embedded systems.

In particular, CARS aims at promoting and fostering discussion on novel ideas and techniques, possibly controversial approaches, it is a forum for on-going work exchange, a place where researchers and developers can share both real problems and innovative solutions. Application areas of interest to the workshop focus on the automotive domain but methods and techniques in other transport domains (e.g. aerospace, railways) are also welcome. The workshop is complementary to the EDCC main track as it focuses on dependability in automotive embedded systems. The intended duration for the workshop is one full day.

Website: http://cars2021.astus.se/

Important Dates:

  • Paper Submission: June 19, 2021
  • Author notification: July 13, 2021
  • WS Camera-Ready Papers: July 19, 2021