Specifying Autonomous System Behaviour

TL;DR

This paper reviews formal methods for specifying autonomous system behaviors, highlighting challenges and current approaches in academia and industry to ensure rigorous and reliable system design.

Contribution

It provides an overview of formal specification techniques for autonomous systems, emphasizing current challenges and the state of the art in both research and industry.

Findings

Formal specifications are crucial for autonomous systems safety.

Existing approaches vary in rigor and applicability.

Challenges include complexity and expressiveness of formal methods.

Abstract

Specifying the intended behaviour of autonomous systems is becoming increasingly important but is fraught with many challenges. This technical report provides an overview of existing work on specifications of autonomous systems and places a particular emphasis on formal specification, i.e. mathematically rigorous approaches to specification that require an appropriate formalism. Given the breadth of this domain, our coverage is necessarily incomplete but serves to provide a brief introduction to some of the difficulties that specifying autonomous systems entails, as well as existing approaches to addressing these difficulties currently pursued in academia and industry.