Engineering Collectives of Self-driving Vehicles: The SOTA Approach

Future cities will be populated by myriads of autonomous self-driving vehicles. Although individual vehicles have their own goals to pursue in autonomy, they may also be part of a collective of vehicles, as in the case of a fleet of vehicles of a car sharing company. Accordingly, they may also be required to act in a coordinated way towards the achievement of specific collective goals, or to meet specific city-level objectives. This raises the issue of properly engineering the behavior of such collective of vehicles, by properly capturing their collective requirements also in consideration of their individual goals, and understanding which knowledge about the state of the collective they must be provided with. In this context, this paper shows how the SOTA model can be a very effective tool to support the engineering of self-driving vehicle collectives. SOTA, by bringing together the lessons of goal-oriented requirements engineering, context-aware systems, and dynamical systems modeling, has indeed the potential for acting as a general reference model to help tackle some key issues in the design and development of complex collective systems immersed in dynamic environments, as collectives of self-driving vehicles are

Making enterprise information systems resilient against disruptive events: a conceptual view

Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) are designed to deal with normal variability in their inputs and data. Empowered by CONTEXT-AWARENESS, some EIS even count on sensors and/or data analytics for capturing changes outside of the system. Nevertheless, context-awareness would often fail when EIS are affected by (large-scale) disruptive events, such as disasters, virus outbreaks, or military conflicts. Hence, in the current paper, we take a step forward, by considering context-awareness for disruptive events. We combine context-awareness with risk management techniques, such as FMECA and FTA, that are useful for defining and mitigating risk events. To avoid having to define the likelihood for such very-low-probability disruptive risks, we use CONSEQUENCE-BASED RISK MANAGEMENT rather than traditional risk management. We augment this approach with the context-awareness paradigm, delivering a contribution that is two-fold: (i) We propose context-awareness-related measures and consequence-based-risk-management-related measures, to address disruptive events; (ii) We reflect this in a method featuring the application of context-awareness and risk management for designing robust and resilient EIS.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Policy Analysi