Managing safety risks in Industry 4.0 (SAFETY ASSURANCE 4.0). (SAFETY ASSURANCE 4.0)

The TETRA project "Safety Assurance 4.0 - Management of Safety Risks in Industry 4.0" aims to answer the question of how to ensure that cooperative/collaborative robots, autonomous mobile robots, autonomously guided vehicles and other autonomous systems can operate safely without having to be trapped in a safety cage.

The following concrete objectives have been set for the Safety Assurance 4.0 TETRA project:

1. To draw up a general overview of recent and ongoing initiatives for international standards or Safety assurance guidelines for autonomous systems or AI/ML-based systems (WP1).

2. Preparation of a report and training material for recent safety risk analysis techniques for

the analysis of autonomous or AI/ML-based systems (WP2).

3. Preparation of an overview and training material on compiling and displaying Safety Cases

for autonomous or AI/ML-based systems (WP3). More specifically, Goal Structuring Notation (GSN), Structured Assurance Case Metamodel (SACM) v2.0 and dynamic risk management are covered.

4. Elaboration of at least four concrete case studies (WP4) in which the above standards, guidelines and techniques are immediately translated into practice. The case studies include two internal case studies (autonomous mobile robot in a smart factory environment and the use of a large industrial robot as cooperative assistant) and at least two generic case studies provided by the guidance group. The support group will be involved in the development of these case studies through Co-Thinking Sessions.

The concrete project results of this project can be summarised as follows:

• A detailed overview of ongoing initiatives for international standards and guidelines for safety assurance of autonomous systems or AI/ML-based systems was made. These were presented to the user group, with additional commentary on the most important standards. A powerpoint with the conclusions is available.
• A detailed report was compiled on the usefulness, use and possible problems with the preparation and use of safety cases in the domain of autonomous systems. In addition, templates were made available to the target group to simplify the drafting of these cases.
• Three concrete case studies were developed. The first demonstrator was an autonomous mobile robot as a typical example of a standard autonomous system. The second part of the project, namely collaborative systems, was studied using the second case study: a large industrial robot that was developed into a cooperative robot. The final case study looked at an autonomous agro-robot. Detailed documentation of these case studies is available.