DLR Institute of Systems Engineering for Future Mobility - Technical Trustworthiness as a Basis for Highly Automated and Autonomous Systems

The newly established Institute of Systems Engineering for Future Mobility within the German Aerospace Center opened its doors at the beginning of 2022. Emerging from the former OFFIS Division Transportation after a two-year transition phase, the new institute can draw on more than thirty years of experience in the research field of safety-critical systems. With the transition to the DLR, the institute's new research roadmap focuses on technical trustworthiness for highly automated and autonomous systems. Within this field, the institute will develop new concepts, methods, and tools to support the integration and assurance of technical trustworthiness for automated and autonomous systems during their whole lifecycle – from the early development through verification, validation, and operation to updates of the systems in the field

Save Maritime Systems Testbed

‘Safe voyage from berth to berth’ — this is the goal of all e-navigation strains, driven by new technologies, new infrastructures and new organizational structures on bridge, on shore as well as in the cloud. To facilitate these efforts suitable engineering and safety/risk assessment methods have to be applied. Understanding maritime transportation as a sociotechnical system allows system engineering methods to be applied. Formal and simulation based verification and validation of e-navigation technologies are important methods to obtain system safety and reliability. The modelling and simulation toolset HAGGIS provides methods for system specification and formal risk analysis. It provides a modelling framework for processes, fault trees and generic hazard specification and a physical world and maritime traffic simulation system. HAGGIS is accompanied by the physical test bed LABSKAUS which implements a reference port and waterway. Additionally, it contains an experimental Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) implementation and a mobile integrated bridge enabling in situ experiments for technology evaluation, testing, ground research and demonstration. This paper describes an integrated seamless approach for developing new e-navigation technologies starting with virtual simulation based assessment and ending in physical real world demonstrations

Interdisciplinary Research Center on Critical Systems Engineering for Socio-Technical Systems - Progress Report

Critical Systems, i.e., systems whose failure either endangers human life or causes drastic economic losses, form the technological backbone of today's society and are an integral part in such vastly diverse industrial sectors as automotive, aerospace, maritime, automation, energy, health care, banking, and others. The Interdisciplinary Research Center on Critical Systems Engineering for Socio-technical Systems addresses critical systems, which rely on synergistically blending human skills with IT-enabled capabilities of technical systems to jointly achieve the overarching societal and industrial objectives. We focus on instances of such socio-technical systems in the transportation domain, where the overarching objectives are to achieve safe and green mobility, through cooperative semi-autonomous guidance of vehicles with humans in the loop, such as in their roles as drivers, operators, navigation officers, flight controllers, etc., and consider two industrial sectors key in Lower Saxony, the automotive and maritime domains. Such systems are safety critical – human errors, technical failures and malicious manipulation of information can cause catastrophic events leading to loss of life. Creating sufficiently precise real-time mental or digital images of real-world situations, and assuring their coherence among all involved actors (both humans and technical systems) as a basis for coordinated action is a major challenge in socio-technical system design. This calls for constructive approaches involving intuitive and scalable patterns of cooperation, between humans and technical systems, seeking for a balanced sharing of tasks best matching both the abilities of humans and technical systems, or between technical systems. It calls for insights in understanding humans in their interaction with technical systems. It calls for layered approaches in aggregating information along both spatio-temporal and cognitive dimensions. It calls for robust and adaptable designs, seamlessly catering with adverse and changing environmental conditions. It calls for executable and composable models of socio-technical systems, both human and technical, allowing to adaptively, as it were, “zoom” into detailed levels, when reaching critical states to provide fine-grained views of the actual interactions, as well as the need to aggregate to coarse views in order to cope with the sheer complexity of such models

Behavioral evaluation of eight rat lines selected for high and low anxiety-related responses

Anxiety traits can be stable and permanent characteristics of an individual across time that is less susceptible of influences by a particular situation. One way to study trait anxiety in an experimental context is through the use of rat lines, selected according to contrasting phenotypes of fear and anxiety. It is not clear whether the behavioral differences between two contrasting rat lines in one given anxiety test are also present in others paradigms of state anxiety. Here, we examine the extent to which multiple anxiety traits generalize across selected animal lines originally selected for a single anxiety trait. We review the behavioral results available in the literature of eight rat genetic models of trait anxiety - namely Maudsley Reactive and Non-reactive rats, Floripa H and L rats, Tsukuba High and Low Emotional rats, High and Low Anxiety-related rats, High and Low Ultrasonic Vocalization rats, Roman High and Low Avoidance rats, Syracuse High and Low Avoidance rats, and Carioca High and Low Conditioned Freezing rats - across 11 behavioral paradigms of innate anxiety or aversive learning frequently used in the experimental setting. We observed both convergence and divergence of behavioral responses in these selected lines across the 11 paradigms. We find that predisposition for specific anxiety traits will usually be generalized to other anxiety provoking stimuli. However this generalization is not observed across all genetic models indicating some unique trait and state interactions. Genetic models of enhanced-anxiety related responses are beginning to help define how anxiety can manifest differently depending on the underlying traits and the current environmentally induced state

Mainstreaming African Diasporic Foodways When Academia Is Not Enough

More than a decade after Britain's bicentennial commemoration of the 1807 Abolition Act to end the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Scotland still struggles to reconcile her colonial past. Unlike in North America, historical archaeology centered on the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade is still highly marginalized in British academia. Furthermore, Scotland's roles in slave-based economies is only recently being considered a relevant area of historical studies. This paper emerges from my evolving perspective as a Black American scholar and resident in the United Kingdom, as I strive to create intellectual spaces in and outside of academia. Through civic engagement, I use my work on African diasporic foodways in the French Caribbean to link with a similar material basis of resistance in the British Caribbean and engage British audiences whose connections to Atlantic slavery are yet to be fully recognized