Legal and political challenges of the cyber-physical social road system

The digital twin constitutes a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) that has a significant social dimension. Road users and democratic publics will not only benefit from the possibilities and opportunities of a CPS integrated into smart mobility systems, but also have to cope with the associated risks. In this respect, the CPS to be developed must be conceived of as a Cyber-Physical Social System (CPsS).

In particular, the development and future implementation of such a CPsS raise legal and political issues that are in need to be be systematically investigated on a fundamental level. The subproject aims to identify, define and develop the potentials as well as the risks from a legal perspective in order to establish normative insights which are to be considered already in the early phase of the development of the CPsS. In turn, a political science analysis of the potentials and risks will be conducted in order to work out the regulatory requirements for a successful future implementation of the CPsS that meets the requirements of democratic theory. In addition, further specific research requirements for social science research on such large-scale systems will be identified.

In this context, not only questions of data protection and data sovereignty, but also specific aspects of public welfare as well as constitutional requirements of democratic participation need to be investigated.