About This Special Issue
Adaptive systems dynamically alter their behavior to compensate errors or changes in the environment. As opposed to standard redundancy or shut-down mechanisms, dynamic adaptation facilitates intelligent and graceful degradation and survivability strategies, enabling the cost-efficient development of highly reliable and safe systems. Currently there are adaptive safety critical systems on the market with dozens of degradation levels. Safety-critical functions are introduced into a system to prevent, or stop the development of an accident. Safety-critical functions may range from simple physical barriers to very complex systems including a lot of software. The safety-critical functions can be of technical nature, but often administrative controls and human actions are included. Several international standards have been introduced related to design and evaluation of safety-critical functions.
Papers are invited for proposing effective methodologies, to address the safety and reliability issues in such safety-critical systems.