The 3rd ASCoMS workshop takes place at SAFECOMP 2014 – with the purpose to gather industrial and academic experts with interests in architecting safety in collaborative mobile systems.

The use of autonomous mobile systems, like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or smart cars, is desirable for many reasons. For instance, UAVs can be used for environmental surveillance and control, and smart vehicles coordinating their behaviours can be used to increase traffic throughput and improve mobility without the need of using more space for the respective traffic infrastructures. New and improved sensor and communication technologies creates new opportunities for designing embedded and mobile systems that are able to interact with their environment, and exhibit “smart” and autonomous behaviour. Furthermore, collaboration between mobile entities can also be envisaged for improving their functionality as well as performance.

However, a fundamental challenge is to ensure that safety requirements are satisfied despite the increased system complexity and the uncertainties introduced by the operation in open and not well defined environments. In general, the problem might be equated in terms of achieving system safety for potentially mass consumer products. From an application perspective, the workshop focuses on distributed and cooperative safety-critical systems. So far, the existing solutions are still insufficient or inadequate and therefore these systems are not allowed to operate in the public air space or on public roads because the risk of causing severe damage or even threaten human lives cannot be excluded with sufficient certainty. This justifies the importance of research in this area, and explains the interest on the subject by the academia and the industry.

The workshop has a main emphasis on architectural approaches towards safety, recognizing that the size and capabilities of current and future systems will require appropriate structuring and abstractions in terms of modularization, separation of concerns, balancing of properties, and supporting interactions between components/subsystems/systems. This becomes especially challenging for safety critical highly dynamic systems such as collaborative mobile systems, truly representing cyber-physical systems of systems.

Contributions are welcome in a number of areas related to the workshop theme including
• Architectural design for safety-critical systems
• Aspects of functional safety
• Reliable perception of the environment
• Coordination and adaptation strategies for safety-critical systems
• Safety in automotive and avionic applications
• System safety guidelines and standards
• Safety, security and robustness/stabilization
• Systems engineering for collaborative mobile systems
• Industrial experiences and best practices relevant for architecting safety

Paper submission details
ASCoMS 2014 solicits thematically relevant papers reporting research results, experience reports, extended abstracts, work-in-progress reports or position papers that are related to the topics mentioned above. All papers must be original, unpublished, and not submitted for publication elsewhere. All prospective participants should submit an extended abstract, work-in-progress report or position paper.

Contributions must be submitted as PDF files, should be at most 8 pages (including references, figures, etc.) in Springer LNCS format, see Information for LNCS Authors. The submissions should explain the contribution to the field and the novelty of the work. Each paper will be reviewed by at three members of the Program Committee. Papers are submitted electronically using the EasyChair online submission system: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ascoms2014

Important Dates
Submission deadline: May 31th, 2014
Notification acceptance: June 20th, 2014 (Camera ready versions: July 1st; Copyright forms: July 1st)
Early SAFECOMP registration: July 10th, 2014 (Participants may also register for workshops only)
ASCoMS’14 Workshop: September 8th, 2014

Program Committee
Jörg Kaiser OVGU, Germany
Rolf Johansson SP, Sweden
Luis Almeida FEUP, Portugal
Fredrik Asplund KTH, Sweden
Karl Goeschka TUWIEN, Austria
Mattias Nyberg Scania and KTH, Sweden
Marc-Olivier Killijian Laas, France
Per Johannessen Volvo AB, Sweden
Teruo Higashino Osaka University, Japan
Abele Andreas Bosch, Germany
Vana Kalogeraki Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Henrik Lönn Volvo AB, Sweden
Erwin Schoitsch AIT, Austria
António Casimiro FCUL, Portugal
Elad Michael Schiller, publicity chair Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Renato Librino, co-chair 4S s.r.l, Italy
Martin Törngren, co-chair KTH, Sweden