Design Criteria to Architect Continuous Experimentation for Self-Driving Vehicles

The software powering today's vehicles surpasses mechatronics as the dominating engineering challenge due to its fast evolving and innovative nature. In addition, the software and system architecture for upcoming vehicles with automated driving functionality is already processing ~750MB/s - corresponding to over 180 simultaneous 4K-video streams from popular video-on-demand services. Hence, self-driving cars will run so much software to resemble "small data centers on wheels" rather than just transportation vehicles. Continuous Integration, Deployment, and Experimentation have been successfully adopted for software-only products as enabling methodology for feedback-based software development. For example, a popular search engine conducts ~250 experiments each day to improve the software based on its users' behavior. This work investigates design criteria for the software architecture and the corresponding software development and deployment process for complex cyber-physical systems, with the goal of enabling Continuous Experimentation as a way to achieve continuous software evolution. Our research involved reviewing related literature on the topic to extract relevant design requirements. The study is concluded by describing the software development and deployment process and software architecture adopted by our self-driving vehicle laboratory, both based on the extracted criteria.Comment: Copyright 2017 IEEE. Paper submitted and accepted at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture. 8 pages, 2 figures. Published in IEEE Xplore Digital Library, URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7930218

Development of hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP) procedures to control organic chemical hazards in the agricultural production of raw food commodities

Hazard Analysis by Critical Control Points (HACCP) is a systematic approach to the identification, assessment and control of hazards in the food chain. Effective HACCP requires the consideration of all possible hazards, i.e., chemical, microbiological and physical. However, current procedures focus primarily upon microbiological and physical hazards, and, to date, chemical aspects of HACCP have received relatively little attention. Consequently, this report discusses the application of HACCP to organic chemical contaminants and the particular problems that are likely to encounter within the agricultural sector. It also presents generic templates for the development of organic chemical contaminant HACCP procedures for selected raw food commodities, i.e., cereal crops, raw meats and milk

The Law Commission presumption concerning the dependability of computer evidence

We consider the condition set out in section 69(1)(b) of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE 1984) that reliance on computer evidence should be subject to proof of its correctness, and compare it to the 1997 Law Commission recommendation that acommon law presumption be used that a computer operated correctly unless there is explicit evidence to the contrary (LC Presumption). We understand the LC Presumption prevails in current legal proceedings. We demonstrate that neither section 69(1)(b) of PACE 1984 nor the LC presumption reflects the reality of general software-based system behaviour

Quality assurance program guidelines for application to and use by manufacturers of rail/guideway vehicles, buses, automatic train control systems, and their major subsystems

Guidelines are presented for a quality assurance system to be implemented by the manufacturer in support of designing, developing, fabricating, assembling, inspecting, testing, handling, and delivery of equipment being procured for use in public urban mass transit systems. The guidelines apply to this equipment when being procured for: (1) use in revenue service; (2) demonstration of systems that will be revenue producing or used by the public; (3) use as a prototype for follow-on operational/revenue producing equipment procurements; and (4) qualification tests