Towards Cyber-Physical-Ethical Systems

The increasing complexity of Cyber-Physical Systems poses the challenge of managing dynamic and heterogeneous components, even more so when ethical concerns are explicitly specified and may affect the system’s behaviour. This paper aims to address ethical considerations as first-class concerns for the development of Cyber-Physical Systems. To this end, we plan to embed ethical requirements in the formal modelling of Cyber-Physical Systems with the goal of enabling a rigorous and quantitative analysis. Four main activities are foreseen to achieve this goal. First, the specification of a language that captures users’ requirements. Second, the development of a modelling formalism that embeds the specification of design elements in Cyber-Physical Systems. Third, a framework that enables the evaluation of these types of systems and produces metrics that quantify their quality. Fourth, a feedback mechanism will be designed to interpret results and provide suggestions to improve the quality of the systems under analysis. This way, we aim to pursue the specification of a new class of systems, namely Cyber-Physical-Ethical systems, where ethics plays a key role in driving the interaction between the cyber and physical components.