A2CPS: A Vehicle-Centric Safety Conceptual Framework for Autonomous Transport Systems

Autonomous vehicle systems within an intelligent transportation systems (ITS) paradigm have attracted continuously increasing interest from both academia and the industry. Safety is a key characteristic; without safety, the dream of autonomous vehicles cannot come true. This paper focuses on vehicle safety aspects and proposes a new conceptual framework, supported by a consolidated, international normative risk management process and is based on a safety-critical architecture brought from an analogous transportation domain, to design and to implement an autonomous supervision and control system (SCS). This SCS approach, based on automotive cyber physical systems (ACPSs) and called autonomous ACPS, aims to minimize the probability of vehicle collision hazard by employing resilient actions at run-time, reducing risks related to potential loss of human lives in the automotive transportation domain.