SafeOps: A Concept of Continuous Safety

Improved safety is one of the key benefits expected from autonomous vehicles. This can only be achieved if the autonomous vehicles are guaranteed to be safe enough. This paper proposes a potential approach contributing to this safety improvement: it describes and investigates "SafeOps", a concept of "continuous safety", based on the DevOps approach, unifying development and operations. DevOps consists in a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being deployed into production, while ensuring high quality. DevOps benefits to system development and delivery by enabling software continuous delivery, faster changes management with faster issues resolution, and improved reliability. SafeOps key principle is to monitor the system in operation and to use this information for validating and certifying a certain safety assurance level. Following this approach, a system could be compliant to a first safety assurance level when it's first delivered and compliant to higher ones when validated in operation.