A Safety and Security Requirements Management Methodology in Reconfigurable Collaborative Human-Robot Application

Abstract

The current industry has to adapt to rapidly changing customers' needs. Reconfigurable manufacturing, therefore, provides capacity and functionality on demand which is essential for competitiveness in fast-changing markets. Furthermore, Industry 4.0 or even more so, Industry 5.0 emphasizes human-centred production with collaborative robots, Cobots, to create human-robot interactions. In such scenarios, safety and security are difficult to address due to the intrinsic features of reconfigurable manufacturing, like exposure to numerous requirements changes in a short period. As safety and security can conflict in different phases of the system life-cycle, one of the earliest activities to avoid conflicts is requirements engineering which can significantly diminish the cost and time of fixing issues compared to later phases like operation. This paper proposes a methodology for safety and security requirements interaction management, including conflict detection and resolution, and shows its applicability through a reconfigurable collaborative human-robot use case. Based on the proposed methodology, we detected and resolved two safety and security requirement conflicts.