Towards an extensive set of criteria for safety and cyber-security evaluation of cyber-physical systems

Verification and validation (V&V) are complex processes combining different approaches and incorporating many different methods including many activities. System engineers regularly face the question if their V&V activities lead to better products, and having appropriate criteria at hand for evaluation of safety and cybersecurity of the systems would help to answer such a question. Additionally, when there is a demand to improve the quality of an already managed V&V process, there is a struggle over what criteria to use in order to measure the improvement. This paper presents an extensive set of criteria suitable for safety and cybersecurity evaluation of cyberphysical systems. The evaluation criteria are agreed upon by 60 researchers from 32 academic and industrial organizations jointly working in a large-scale European research project on 13 real-world use cases from the domains of automotive, railway, aerospace, agriculture, healthcare, and industrial robotics.

Verification and validation of an automated robot inspection cell for automotive body-in-white: a use case for the VALU3S ECSEL project

Verification and validation (V&V) of systems, and system of systems, in an industrial context has never been as important as today. The recent developments in automated cyber-physical systems, digital twin environments, and Industry 4.0 applications require effective and comprehensive V&V mechanisms. Verification and Validation of Automated Systems' Safety and Security (VALU3S), a Horizon 2020 Electronic Components and Systems for European Leadership Joint Undertaking (ECSEL-JU) project started in May 2020, aims to create and evaluate a multi-domain V&V framework that facilitates evaluation of automated systems from component level to system level, with the aim of reducing the time and effort needed to evaluate these systems. VALU3S focuses on V&V for the requirements of safety, cybersecurity, and privacy (SCP). This paper mainly focuses on the elaboration of one of the 13 use cases of VALU3S to identify the SCP issues in an automated robot inspection cell that is being actively used for the quality control assessment of automotive body-in-white. The joint study here embarks on a collaborative approach that puts the V&V methods and workflows for the robotic arms safety trajectory planning and execution, fault injection techniques, cyber-physical security vulnerability assessment, anomaly detection, and SCP countermeasures required for remote control and inspection. The paper also presents cross-links with ECSEL-JU goals and the current advancements in the market and scientific and technological state-of-play.

Charge directed assembly of CdTe/CdS nanoparticles inside monocrystalline KH2PO4

The synthesis of aqueous CdTe/CdS quantum dots (QDs) embedded in potassium dihydrogen phosphate KH₂PO₄ (KDP) is demonstrated.