Uncertainty Management in Situation Awareness for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are a result of highly cross-disciplinary processes and are evolving to perform increasingly challenging tasks in dynamically changing environments. This leads to an increasing CPS complexity and therefore the management of uncertainty to ensure the trustworthiness of these systems is needed. Our paper focuses on uncertainty management (UM) both in general and more specifically in the context of CPS situation awareness (SA). The motivation behind this is the important role of SA and its many inherent uncertainties. To this end, firstly, a literature review is conducted to acquire the state of the art of UM. Later, we present findings and observations from the literature review, with two main challenges identified - inconsistent understanding and terminology among a multitude of uncertainty perspectives, and a lack of collaboration among different communities. On this basis, lastly, two case studies are conducted to exemplify the challenges and provide brief ideas on how to deal with them. The whole investigation in the paper suggests an urgent strengthening of common understanding through enhanced collaboration and regulations.