Machine safety conformance limitations for highly automated and autonomous heavy-duty mobile machinery

Abstract

There is a great drive and incentive in industry to increase the level of automation in heavy-duty mobile machinery, but further progress is slowed down due to a lack of regulations and division of legal responsibilities, on top of the limitations of system capabilities in terms of reliability, maintainability, performance, and available technologies. In higher levels of automation, the operator is no longer in full control of the machine, and the machine itself becomes the controller. The newly emerging requirements for safety are not covered by existing standards leading to difficulties for manufacturers to embed a justifiable level of safety into their machinery. In this paper, we first provide a survey on relevant recent research efforts towards safer highly automated and autonomous systems. We then discuss the conformance process and emerging limitations of existing EU machine safety regulations in relation to an increase of automation in heavy-duty mobile machinery. Guided by a clarifying example we then identify six topics in existing EU machine safety regulations, limiting the conformance of machinery a) run-time failures, b) algorithmic failures, c) convoluted architectural design patterns, d) data-driven intended behaviour, e) quality integration and f) formal verification limitations. We assert that reaching future compliance of highly automation and autonomous heavy-duty mobile machinery is achieved through overcoming the aforementioned limitations.