António Casimiro is organizing the next workshop of the IFIP 10.4 Working Group on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance, which is about Autonomous and Cooperative Intelligent Vehicles: New safety and security challenges, or yet another critical infrastructure?. The workshop will take place in Brazil, on June 26-28, and will gather specialists in the automotive, avionics, dependability and security areas, to discuss current problems and approaches for achieving effective solutions for autonomous intelligent and cooperative vehicles.

This is a hot topic being currently addressed in the research community and in the industry. Despite the apparent availability of the needed technology, the known examples of fully autonomous vehicles that have been built so far are very restricted. Moreover, that either operate in very controlled environments, or require a big pool of expensive equipment, or are under human supervision for ultimate control, or combinations of all these.

Therefore, some of the specific questions that will be addressed include:

• Initiatives and example systems: where are we right now?
• Legal restrictions vs technological restrictions: which are the main obstacles for autonomy?
• Do we have appropriate frameworks to simultaneously handle safety and security requirements?
• From the autonomous single vehicle to an infrastructure of smart connected autonomous vehicles: is this a new critical infrastructure?
• From autonomous to cooperating vehicles: just a small step, or a major endeavour?