Ponderarium, a Place for Cyber Physical System Conformity Assessment

Nowadays, complex Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are commonly exchanged (found or available) on the market. However, this complexity does not allow citizens or consumers to properly understand the quality, security, and safety of these products. When considering CPS, such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autopilots on aircraft, or in vitro medical devices, consumers rely on local regulations, international standards, or even simply their presence on the market to buy, use, and trust these products. Still, when examining regulations and directives provided by the European Union (EU) and other governments, only the documentation, not the product, needs to be assessed for compliance. Of course, manufacturers are also interested in knowing if their products satisfy their own set of requirements before putting them on the market. In this paper, we discuss the need for a Conformity Assessment tool, Ponderarium, that enables interested parties to assess the quality, security, and safety of CPSs based on static resources. Then, we devise a methodology, we create a first version of Ponderarium supporting the methodology and we validate it using open-source software for a medical device. The purpose of Ponderarium is to enable interested parties to assess the conformity of a CPS from related static resources (such as computer code or network frames) with respect to a specific set of requirements extracted from natural language legal texts. This paper provides a foundation for future research to automatically assess the legal conformity of CPSs.