Guest Editorial: Emerging Trends in Safety-Critical Issues for Intelligent Automation Systems
Résumé
Intelligent Automation Systems, such as automated storage and retrieval systems, self-driving vehicles, various types of autonomous robots, and autonomous workshop plants, act independently of direct human supervision. Their impact on society and human life will be significant. These automation systems are safety-critical, complex, and powerful with a higher-level functionality. Safety and reliability to perform their tasks safely and minimize failures is one of the key challenges and becomes costly and difficult to achieve. The development of novel safety and reliability technologies dealing with theoretical aspects and for intelligent automation systems has become a hot spot in recent years. With the novel safety and reliability technologies, the intelligent automation systems can detect system failures, identify operation risks, predict unknown safety hazards and vulnerabilities, and avoid situations that pose risks to humans, property, or the automation systems themselves. Recent developments confirm that there are still areas of research to be explored within the safety-critical approaches.
This Special Issue on Emerging Trends in Safety-critical Issues for Intelligent Automation Systems of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (TASE) aims to present recent advances in theories, methods, and applications that address safety-critical challenges in autonomous intelligent systems. The objective is to compile state-of-the-art research that contributes to the development of resilient and trustworthy automation solutions in safety-sensitive scenarios. After a thorough and rigorous peer-review process, 27 high-quality articles were selected from numerous submissions worldwide. These articles closely align with the Special Issue’s scope and can be categorized into seven key topics.
- Risk assessment and model-based safety and cybersecurity analysis [A1], [A2], [A3], [A4], [A5].
- Intelligent fault detection and fault-tolerant control [A6], [A7], [A8], [A9], [A10].
- Reliability and traceability of decision-making for intelligent automation systems [A11], [A12], [A13].
- Conflict detection and resolution in intelligent automation systems [A14], [A15].
- Safety- and security-related issues including functional safety and system security [A16], [A17], [A18].
- Design, development, validation, and applications of intelligent automation systems such as UAVs, UGVs, and UUVs [A19], [A20], [A21], [A22], [A23].
- Human-robot collaboration, risk assessment of intelligent automation [A24], [A25], [A26], [A27].
We believe this collection will provide a valuable reference for academia and industry alike, and inspire further research in this rapidly evolving field.