Role-based Approach as Support for Safety Analysis of Collaborative Systems

Modern collaborative and dynamic systems, such as System of Systems (SoS), can be considered as a set of interacting entities where the interactions are seen as the core activity for these systems. The study of interactions is of importance in order to discover emergent and interdependent properties that impact the overall system's behaviour. We introduce a role-based approach together with a taxonomy of roles for safety as a means to deal with emergent behaviours of high-collaborative systems that may impact the safety of the whole system. The aim of our role-based approach is to discover the interactions that may be harmful for the system and use them as starting point for common safety analysis techniques.