Governance-Embedded Scrum for AIoT in Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems: A Maritime Smart-Ship Case
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Smart ships are increasingly built as AIoT-enabled cyber-physical systems, yet safety-critical maritime software must preserve deterministic control, auditability and certification evidence while still allowing rapid service evolution. This article presents a shortened journal version of a governance-embedded Scrum framework that couples a certifiable monolithic safety core with modular AIoT services through a secure API gateway. The gateway enforces authentication and authorization, schema and contract conformance, rate and priority control, and auditable mediation between read-only service views and protected safety buses. Governance checkpoints are embedded into sprint planning, daily monitoring, sprint review and retrospective activities, so that security, compliance, resilience and traceability evidence are produced within each increment rather than added after development. Validation was conducted through a digital-twin simulation, a hardware-in-the-loop laboratory rig and an integrated prototype emulating more than 500 shipboard devices under nominal, adverse, security and update scenarios. Compared with cloud-centric microservices and a hybrid baseline without governance, the proposed framework reduced p95 latency by up to 38%, shortened mean time to recovery by up to 55%, improved deployment lead time by 28%, and maintained approximately 99.9% reliability in controlled tests. The results indicate that governed interfaces and in-sprint assurance can reduce the safety-innovation gap in maritime AIoT, although live-vessel validation remains future work.
DOI: 10.65164/ks7hkf76
Language: English
Subfield: Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7214770086