Mario Trapp

The safetronic® is the industry's premier conference for the holistic safety of road vehicles. In November 2022, experts from the automotive industry met again to discuss challenges, solutions and trends. Although the safety of automated vehicles and, in particular, the associated safety assurance of AI are currently in the public spotlight, the experts at the conference had a different perspective. For them, a well-known topic is experiencing a revival and is emerging as a new trend topic: model-based system safety engineering (MBSE). Having worked on model-based safety engineering for well over a decade now, I'm personally as intrigued by this trend as I am skeptical about whether it's going to take off this time. That's reason enough for me to take a closer look at this potential trend from my individual perspective in this article.

Safety is a property of a system and its environment. That's why predicting a system's context is so important to safety engineers. However, we must acknowledge that it is impossible to sufficiently predict and specify a system's context when it must operate outside of a controlled environment. In the previous parts of this series, we've seen how we can use self-adaptivity to build systems for uncertain, dynamic contexts. In this fourth and final part, we add the missing ingredient by taking safety engineering to the next level.

What are the basic principles of self-adaptive systems? This is the basic prerequisite for bringing the concept of resilience to life. Part 3 of our series.

Resilience is the key ingredient for the next generation of cognitive cyber-physical systems. After all, many visions of the future can only become reality if the systems become aware of themselves, their goals and their context in order to be able to adapt to unknown and changing environments. And in doing so always optimize utility while preserving safety. But resilience can only be bought with increased complexity. In this article, part 2 of our series on resilience, we look at the character of complexity to better understand where to start engineering in order to manage this complexity.

Resilience is a key ingredient for lifting cars, industrial manufacturing and medical devices to the next level. It is far more than a fancier synonym of dependability. And the aspect that resilience is standing for is essential for building cognitive systems. That's why resilience is the focus of a new series on the Safe Intelligence Blog. In the first part, we will look behind the term and clarify why resilience is so important and why it is more than just a synonym for dependability.

Machine learning means a disruptive challenge for safety assurance. Without an acceptable safety assurance concept, many great ideas will not find their way to the market. It’s therefore no surprise that AI safety has gained much more attention over the past few months. A brief series of articles will take a closer look at the importance of safety for AI. The first article focuses on the basic understanding of what safety actually means. It highlights why it is so important to understand that safe AI has less to do with AI itself and much more to do with safety engineering.

In this interview apl. Prof. Dr. habil. Mario Trapp, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS, talks about the competencies of the institute that make cognitive systems safe.