SafeCOP (Safe Cooperating Cyber-Physical Systems using Wireless Communication) is European Union Ecsel JU –funded project including partners from the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden), Italy and Portugal, which will establish a safety assurance approach, a platform architecture, and tools for cost-efficient and practical certification of cooperating cyber-physical systems (CO-CPS).

SafeCOP targets safety-related CO-CPS characterized by use of wireless communication, multiple stakeholders, dynamic system definitions, and unpredictable operating environments. In this scenario, no single stakeholder has the overall responsibility over the resulted system-of-systems; safe cooperation relies on the wireless communication; and security and privacy are important concerns. Although such CO-CPS can successfully address several societal challenges, and can lead to new applications and new markets, their certification and development is not adequately addressed by existing practices.

SafeCOP will provide an approach to the safety assurance of CO-CPS, enabling thus their certification and development. The project will define a platform architecture and will develop methods and tools, which will be used to produce safety assurance evidence needed to certify cooperative functions. SafeCOP will extend current wireless technologies to ensure safe and secure cooperation. SafeCOP will also contribute to new standards and regulations, by providing certification authorities and standardization committees with the scientifically validated solutions needed to craft effective standards extended to also address cooperation and system-of-systems issues.

FMI role

FMI, as a provider of tailored weather services for the different locations in Europe and nearby locations, is also concerned about the ensuring flawless and undisturbed delivery of this data. The data delivery should be ensured for both fixed locations like road administrator facilities through wired links as well as nomadic, mobile users accessed only through wireless connections. In SafeCOP project these aspects are especially interesting for FMI. The concept of combined RWS/RSU has possessed essential role in many research projects of FMI, but the secure communication of the unit has not considered carefully. In order to transform this concept into the near-to-the-market approach the security vulnerabilities must be shield, and for this purpose SafeCOP offers research environment.

FMI main objectives are collected and conducted in one of the project pilot use cases, Use Case 4. In this Use Case, FMI (together with other finnish partners, SITOWISE and Alten Finland) is extending the responsibilities of RWS to also deliver the up-to-date local road weather information based on its own observations directly to the passing vehicles, with wireless IEEE 802.11p communication, following vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and infra-structure-to-vehicle mechanisms typical in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networking (VANET). In exchange, a vehicle can also deliver its own observational information back to the RWS, to be consumed as local supporting data in wide-area meteorological services. The key element of this kind of operation is that the data exchanged between vehicles and roadside infrastructure can be trusted, and all kind of violation and distortion of the data can be reliably avoided.

Scenario

The general view of this scenario is overviewed in the block diagram presented in the following figure.

In the centre of operations, we have interactive RSU (with embedded RWS in this special case), which is interacting with vehicles passing the station and with the (road weather) service provider, who is representing here both authority weather service provider and user and evaluator of vehicle oriented data. The generalized usage scenarios are presented in the figure above, with the yellow-filled boxes referring to the SafeCOP-oriented features embedded to the general scenario.