[SystemSafety] Uber Advanced Technologies Group publishes its "Safety Case Framework"

[Bruce Hunter]

To be fair to Uber ATG, this is only meant to be the first layers and goals
are developed only at a summary level. Although it misses the supporting
strategy or context, it is good that they have gone public with this but it
needs wider scrutiny and judgement against accepted standards.

Looking at the cybersecurity goals in G4.3 ("Potential harm from cyber
intrusion is appropriately mitigated") does miss some critical elements but
is a good start.
An interesting conflict point is in G4.3.4.2 "Over the air updates minimise
duration of cyber vulnerabilities". Updates may be just as threatening to
operational safety as the intrusions they are meant to protect against.

It is a shame this Safety Case was not completed and agreed before Uber AV
trails were started. You wouldn't get away with it in other industries.

I hope Uber engages the wider professional community to truly validate the
safety of their autonomous vehicle deployment. To quote Uber's next scary
step "Melbourne, Dallas and Los Angeles are becoming the first cities to
offer Uber Air flights, with the goal of beginning demonstrator flights in
2020 and commercial operations in 2023". Not sure if this safety-case
approach is sufficient for the current road-based Uber AV let alone Uber
Elevate project.

Bruce

On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 at 02:14, Martyn Thomas <martyn at thomas-associates.co.uk>
wrote:

> It doesn't come close to the hard questions, such as "how safe is safe
> enough?" and "what evidence would be sufficient to show with very high
> confidence that this level of safety has been achieved?".
>
> So far, they have published the goals. I'd like to see one of the
> hardest goals (cybersecurity for example, or even just "securing the
> supply chain") taken into enough detail that it exposes how this will be
> done and explains how the assurance will be sufficient for a
> safety-critical system.
>
> Why does Uber think they have to reinvent all this? Why not start with
> the processes that are used by Airbus, Siemens and Boeing, say?  And
> update them with the special problems that autonomous cars face (such as
> high bandwidth connectivity, machine learning, and cyclists).
>
> If they don't build explicitly and rigorously on what other
> safety-critical systems engineers have done, they will have to repeat
> decades of work and failures.
>
> Martyn
>
>
> On 22/07/2019 14:58, Paul Sherwood wrote:
> > Colleagues referred me to an article [1] describing Uber's "...
> > blueprint for safe self-driving cars it wants the rest of the industry
> > to follow".
> >
> > I think the article is an interesting read in itself, separate from
> > the Safety Case website [2] and Uber's own article about the approach [3]
> >
> > [1]
> >
> https://qz.com/1667964/ubers-launched-its-safety-case-for-self-driving-cars/
> > [2] https://uberatg.com/safetycase
> > [3]
> >
> https://medium.com/@UberATG/trailblazing-a-safe-path-forward-e02f5f9ef0cc
> >
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