The Safe Autonomy workshop explores concepts, techniques and technology related to the continuous safety assurance of autonomous systems (AS). Autonomous systems include a wide range of systems such as autonomous road vehicles, autonomous off-road machinery for agriculture or mining, autonomous robot dogs, autonomous drones, autonomous ships and many more. Technology that drives these AS and their capabilities is making significant progress, but safety assurance is lagging and limits innovation of technological advances. Previous workshops focused on the risk management capabilities of AS. This remains an important aspect of this workshop, but we also welcome a broad range of contributions in any related area that push market introduction and innovations by dealing with the safety challenge.  AS have enormous potential to transform society. The key trait of AS is their ability to pursue and achieve their goals independently and without human guidance or intervention. In contexts where safety needs to be guaranteed, it is difficult currently to exploit autonomous systems to their full potential due to the difficulty in providing assurance they will be safe throughout operation. The assurance challenge increases when AS take advantage of Machine Learning to cope with the complexity of their mission and the operating context, and when assuring AS in the context of systems of systems where emergent behaviours and dynamic composition must be considered.

It invites experts, researchers, and practitioners for presentations and in-depth discussions about assuring autonomy, its relevance for specific use cases, its relation to existing regulatory frameworks and standardization activities, and solutions from systems and software engineering.

Safe Autonomy aims at bringing together communities from diverse disciplines, such as safety engineering, runtime adaptation, predictive modelling, control theory, and from different application domains such as automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture and critical infrastructures. 

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

• Full papers (max. 8 pages)
• Position papers (max. 4 pages)

Deadlines:

Paper submission :Jan 17th, 2025

Author notification: Jan 31st, 2025

Camera-ready paper: Mar 5th, 2025

List of Topics

The Safe Autonomy workshop will explore a range of topics related to continuous safety assurance of AS including but not limited to:

• Dynamic risk management
• situational awareness
• resilience
• human machine interaction
• uncertainty management
• assurance cases
• virtual validation
• Safety assessment

Committees

Program Committee

• TBA

Organizing committee

• Rasmus Adler
• Richard Hawkins
• Nishanth Laxman
• Philipp Schleiss

Venue

The workshop will be held in Lisbon, Portugal on the 8th April 2025 as part of the 20th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC).