EDCC: International DREAMS Workshop

Autonomous systems have enormous potential and are bound to be a major driver in future economic and societal transformations. In contexts where safety, or other critical properties, need to be guaranteed, it is, however, presently not possible to exploit the full potential of autonomous systems. Unknowns and uncertainties are induced due to the high complexity of autonomous behaviors, the utilized technology, and the volatile and highly complex system contexts. These characteristics render the base assumptions of established assurance methodologies (and standards) void; hence new approaches need to be investigated.

One general approach for making autonomous systems dependable is to make them aware of risks and empower them to assess and control those risks. Implementing such a Dynamic Risk Management (DRM) approach comes with many challenges concerning the necessary self-awareness and context awereness. On the one hand, powerful and thus complex self-awareness and context awareness are necessary to minimize risks, resolve conflicting objectives, and make acceptable trade-off decisions. On the other hand, the complexity of DRM is in conflict with assurance and high confidence in adequate risk management. DRM has the potential to not only outright enable certain types of systems or applications, but also to significantly increase the performance of already existing ones. This is due to the fact that by resolving unknowns and dealing with uncertainties at runtime it will be possible to get rid of worst-case assumptions, which are typically detrimental to a system's performance properties.

The DREAMS Workshop intends to explore concepts, techniques and technology for realizing DRM.

It invites experts, researchers, and practitioners for presentations and in-depth discussions about the current status of DRM in practice, its relevance for specific use cases, its relation to existing assurance frameworks for autonomous systems, and standardization activities. DREAMS aims at bringing together communities from diverse disciplines, such as safety engineering, runtime adaptation, predictive modeling, and control theory, and from different application domains such as automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture and critical infrastructures.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to

• Definition and modeling of the Operational Design Domain
• Approaches for monitoring AI-based components
• (Runtime) estimation and handling of uncertainties
• Approaches for formalizing risk and risk assessment
• Ethics of risk / machine ethics
• (Dynamic) assurance cases for autonomous systems and AI
• Collecting data from operation for continuous risk management / MLOps   
• Case studies

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the program committee.

They will be evaluated based on originality, contribution to the field, technical and presentation quality, and relevance to the workshop.

Please consider the following page limits:

• Regular technical papers describing original theoretical or practical work (6-8 pages)
• Case studies describing practitioner experience or field studies (8-12 pages)   
• PhD Forum papers describing objectives, methodology, and results at an early stage of research (6-8 pages)
• Position papers on challenges and emerging trends (3-4 pages)   

All submissions should describe, in English, original work that has not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere.
Papers will be evaluated based on originality, contribution to the field, technical and presentation quality, and relevance to the workshop.

PDF versions of the submissions should be submitted electronically via EasyChair.

Please note that the review process is double-blind, so papers submitted for consideration should not include the names of the authors and their affiliations.

We are in the process of negotiating the best option for the workshop proceedings. This information will be available soon at the workshop website. We request submissions to be prepared in the standard Springer LNCS conference format: Authors should consult Springer's authors' guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word, for the preparation of their papers.

Corresponding authors of accepted papers, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, should expect that they will have to complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form.

Organizers

• Rasmus Adler (Fraunhofer IESE, Germany)
• Richard Hawkins (University of York, UK)
• Phillipp Schleiß (Fraunhofer IKS, Germany) 

Program Committee

• Daniel Schneider (Fraunhofer IESE, Germany)
• Jan Reich (Fraunhofer IESE, Germany)
• Simon Burton (Fraunhofer IKS, Germany)
• Selma Saidi (TU Dortmund, Germany)
• Huascar Espinoza (KDT JU, France)
• Patrik Feth (Sick AG, Germany)
• John Molloy (University of York, UK)
• Fabian Oboril (Intel, Germany)
• Yiannis Papadopoulos (University of Hull, UK)
• Ganesh Pai (NASA, KBR, USA)
• Phil Kopmann (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• Eric Armengaud (Armengaud Innovate GmbH, Austria)
• Roman Gansch (Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany)
• Mohammed Abuteir (TTech, Austria)
  
• Riccardo Mariani (Nvidia, Italy)
• RICQUE Bertrand (Safran Electronics & Defense, France)
• Ran Wei (Dalian University of Technology, China)
• Michael Woon (retrospect, US)
• Thomas Freudenmann (EDI GmbH, Germany) 

The proceeding is now available online and can be accessed at http://link.springer.com/openurl.asp?genre=issue&issn=1865-0929&volume=1656