Reliability-Aware Requirements Development for Autonomy Software

Autonomy is the ability of a system to make decisions and take actions in the presence of uncertainty. Validating autonomy, therefore, is a matter of validating that the system makes intelligent decisions even when there might be discrepancies between the observed and the expected state of the world as well as when the possible outcome of the possible courses of action is uncertain. During the requirements engineering phase, the functions and their expected behavior are specified. However, in the case of autonomous system, it is challenging to specify all possible scenarios that they may encounter. Since autonomous behaviors cannot always be predetermined, it is difficult to reason about their completeness and correctness. While these challenges are also faced with non-autonomous system, they are more prevalent for autonomous system due to their complexity and emergent behavior.