SafeSoCPS: A Composite Safety Analysis Approach for System of Cyber-Physical Systems

The System of Cyber-Physical Systems (SoCPS) comprises several independent Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) that interact with each other to achieve a common mission that the individual systems cannot achieve on their own. SoCPS are rapidly gaining attention in various domains, e.g., manufacturing, automotive, avionics, healthcare, transportation, and more. SoCPS are extremely large, complex, and safety-critical. As these systems are safety-critical in nature, it is necessary to provide an adequate safety analysis mechanism for these collaborative SoCPS so that the whole network of these CPSs work safely. This safety mechanism must include composite safety analysis for a network of collaborative CPS as a whole. However, existing safety analysis techniques are not built for analyzing safety for dynamically forming networks of CPS. This paper introduces a composite safety analysis approach called SafeSoCPS to analyze hazards for a network of SoCPS. In SafeSoCPS, we analyze potential hazards for the whole network of CPS and trace the faults among participating systems through a fault propagation graph. We developed a tool called SoCPSTracer to support the SafeSoCPS approach. Human Rescue Robot System—a collaborative system—is taken as a case study to validate our proposed approach. The result shows that the SafeSoCPS approach enables us to identify 18 percent more general faults and 63 percent more interaction-related faults in a network of a SoCPS.