CARS 2025

9^th International Workshop on
Critical Automotive Applications: Robustness & Safety

April 8, 2025. Lisbon, Portugal

The CARS workshop is a forum focusing on architecture, methods and development techniques for safety-related automotive embedded systems and applications. The 9th edition of CARS is collocated with EDCC 2025, Lisbon, Portugal.

To participate, register at https://edcc2025.campus.ciencias.ulisboa.pt/registration.html.

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Workshop Program

8:30 -- 9:00 Workshop Registration

9:00 -- 9:30 welcome

9:30 -- 10:30 Keynote: 

Safe and Secure AI/ML-driven Autonomous Vehicles? 

Not anywhere near yet … 

Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Resilient Computing and Cybersecurity Center (RC3)

KAUST, University of Science and Technology King Abdullah, in Thuwal. KSA

10:30 -- 11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 -- 12:30 Technical Session 1:  Modeling and design process

• Exploring the Impact of Large Language Models on Safety-Critical Processes
  Shanza Ali Zafar, Francesco Carella and Núria Mata
• Automotive applications augmented with Large Language Models: a research vision
  Beatriz Cabrero-Daniel, Malsha Ashani Mahawatta Dona, Ali Nouri, Tayssir Bouraffa and Krishna Ronanki
• Approach for experimental evaluation of automotive virtualization
  Gonçalo Folhas and Frederico Cerveira

12:30 -- 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 -- 15:00 Technical Session 2: Safety critical automotive systems

• Safety-Counter-Player: Utilizing potentially unsafe capabilities in safety-critical system
  Mario Trapp, Benjamin Herd and Benedikt Rank
• On the Design of a Dynamic Consensus Framework for Agreement Seeking in Maneuver Coordination
  João Almeida, Bruno Ribeiro, Emanuel Vieira and Joaquim Ferreira
• Neural Space-Filling Curves for Traffic Event Retrieval in Automotive Perception Systems: A Research Vision
  Tayssir Bouraffa

15:30 -- 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 -- 17:30 Technical Session 3: DevOps, industrial perspective and wrap-up

• Business Drivers for Trustworthy DevOps
  Rolf Johansson, Anders Cassel, Fredrik Beckman, Murat Erdogan, Martin Törngren, Martin Lehto and Tom Strandberg.
• Open discussion & wrap-up: any question on any paper of the day

The last session can stop at 17:00

Workshop topics and goals:

The increasing complexity of automotive applications, the challenges posed by autonomous vehicles, the need to master production costs using off-the-shelf components, the coexistence of critical and non-critical applications, and the emergence of new architectural paradigms may have a strong effect on dependability of automotive embedded systems. This situation requires design and validation methods, but also tools to improve automotive systems robustness and their safety and security properties.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in the construction of critical automotive applications and systems. It will place emphasis on:

· dependability issues,

· software engineering for robustness,

· security and safety issues,

· real-time embedded systems technologies,

· architectural software and hardware solutions,

· development processes for dependable automotive embedded systems.

CARS is a forum for on-going work exchange.

In particular, CARS aims at promoting and fostering discussion on novel ideas and techniques, possibly controversial approaches, a place where researchers and developers can share both real problems and innovative solutions.

Topics of interest for the workshop are large and include:

· Safety in the development processes and safety management,

· Combined approaches for safety and security,

· Autonomous systems, Car-to-X, ADAS and safety

· Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF),

· Hardware and software support for dependable automotive systems.

· Middleware and tool support for dependable embedded automotive systems,

· Open-source approaches

· Hierarchy of SEooC (Safety Elements out of Context) for very complex systems as e.g. ADS

· Real-time operating systems, WCET estimation, schedulability analysis,

· Modeling and code generation techniques,

· Software safety analysis and formal verification techniques for automotive systems,

· Coordination, communication, networking and distributed control architectures,

· Diagnosis approaches, failure data, practical experience reports of critical applications,

· Validation and verification techniques,

· Cloud-based automotive applications and AI,

· Cybersecurity and connected cars.

Application areas of interest to the workshop focus on the automotive domain but methods and techniques in other transport domains (e.g. aerospace, railways) are also welcome.

Committees

Workshop organizers:

· Jean-Charles Fabre (LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France)

· Rolf Johansson (Astus, Gothenburg, Sweden)

· Mario Trapp (Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany)

Program committee – Academic members:

• Benjamin Herd, Fraunhofer IKS
• Daniel Schneider, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
• Felicita Di Giandomenico, CNR Pisa, Italy
• Ilaria Matteucci, IIT CNR, Pisa, Italy
• Martin Törngren. KTH, Sweden
• Michael Lauer, LAAS-CNRS, France
• Nicolas Navet, Univ. Luxembourg
• Peter Puschner, Technische Universitaet Wien, Austria
• Yiannis Papadopoulos, University of Hull, UK
• Tomasz Kloda, LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France

Program committee – Industry members:

• Amina Mekki-Mokhtar, Ansys, France
• Fredrik Sandblom, Volvo Autonomous Solutions, Sweden
• Fredrik Törner, Volvo Car Corporation, Sweden
• Jelena Frtunikj, NVIDIA, Germany
• John favaro, Trust-services, Italy
• Mathilde Machin, Airbus, France
• Mattias Nyberg, Scania, Sweden
• Nadège Rizet, Ampère lab, Renault, France
• Olivier Flébus, Vitesco, France

Former editions:

The former editions were very successful events:

· CARS@EDCC2010, Valencia, Spain

· CARS@SAFECOMP2013, Toulouse, France

· CARS@EDCC2015, Paris, France

· CARS@EDCC2016, Gothenburg, Sweden

· CARS@EDCC2019, Napoli, Italy

· CARS@EDCC2021, Munich, Germany

· CARS@EDCC2022, Zaragoza, Spain

· CARS@EDCC2024, Leuven, Belgium