Autonomous Emergency Braking: A System-of-Systems perspective

In June 2012 the Ratings Group of EURO-NCAP published a strategic roadmap of the NCAP organization about the required safety features of new cars up to the year 2016. According to this roadmap Autonomous Emergency Braking Systems (AEBS) to detect and protect pedestrians should be deployed on a wide scale in new cars by the year 2016. In a car equipped with an AEBS there are two autonomous systems that compete for the control over the car, the human driver and the AEBS. In this paper we analyze the coordination of these two autonomous subsystems from the perspective of System-of-Systems in order to avoid the emergence of detrimental behavior and elaborate on the dependability mechanisms required to ensure safe operation.