Software Engineering Institute

One of the biggest obstacles to the procurement and deployment of coordinated autonomous systems is the difficulty of assuring them, that is, to set and manage their performance expectations. This article introduces a reliability engineering assurance approach based on probabilistic model checking.

It also introduces two models to guide and extend the reliability engineering approach:

1. Characterization of the range of autonomous coordination phenomena.
2. Phases of a coordinated mission.

Two instances of the models are implemented as discrete-time Markov chains (DTMC). Results from in-progress validation experiments with robots are reported, as well.