Formal Methods in Resilient Systems Design using a Flexible Contract Approach

Abstract

Resilience is a much-needed characteristic in systems that are expected to operate in uncertain, disruptive environments for extended periods. Resilience approaches today employ ad hoc methods and piece-meal solutions that are difficult to verify and test, and do not scale. Furthermore, it is difficult to assess the long-term impact of such ad hoc resilience solutions. This research presents a flexible contract-based approach that employs a combination of formal methods for verification and testing and flexible assertions and probabilistic modeling to handle uncertainty during mission execution. A flexible contract (FC) is a hybrid modeling construct that facilitates system verification and testing while offering the requisite flexibility to cope with non-determinism. This research illustrates the use of FCs for multi-UAV swarm control in partially observable, dynamic environments. However, the approach is sufficiently general for use in other domains such as self-driving vehicle and adaptive power/energy grids.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 21, 2018
Accession Number
AD1065326

Entities

People

  • Ayesha Madni
  • Azad Madni
  • Dan Erwin
  • Edwin Ordoukhanian
  • Parisa Pouya

Organizations

  • Systems Engineering Research Center

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Biomedical
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Autonomous Navigation
  • Autonomous Systems
  • Cecum
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Department Of Defense
  • Engineering
  • Engineers
  • Guarantees
  • Humanitarian Assistance
  • Materials
  • Model Based Systems Engineering
  • Motion Planning
  • Operations Research
  • Probabilistic Models
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Reliability
  • Resilience
  • Robots
  • Simulations
  • System Of Systems
  • Systems Engineering
  • United States

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

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