A Vision of Applied Ethics in Industrial Cyber-Physical Sytems

Résumé En

Industrial cyber-physical systems integrate learning capacities and are intended to interact and cooperate with humans. These characteristics contribute to their complexity and harden their engineering process. More, their evolving knowledge increases the difficulty of their validation during research and development stages. In this paper, the difficulties encountered during the engineering of these systems are underlined. A specific focus is set on ethical considerations, which must be addressed along their design and use. We study more precisely the application of ethical paradigms and types in the context of industrial cyber-physical systems. An overview of the main approaches is proposed and a vision of what could be the concept of applied ethics in industrial cyber-physical systems is suggested. From that vision, a set of questionings regarding different stakeholders is constructed as an illustration. This proposal shows the diversity and the complexity of the ethical questions, which could help raising the awareness of researchers, designers and engineers working on industrial cyber-physical systems.