Identifying Run-Time Monitoring Requirements for Autonomous Systems Through the Analysis of Safety Arguments

Abstract

It is crucial that safety assurance continues to be managed for autonomous systems (AS) throughout their operation. This can be particularly challenging where AS operate in complex and dynamic environments. The importance of effective safety monitoring in ensuring the safety of AS through-life is already well documented. These current approaches often rely on utilising monitored information that happens to be available, or are reliant solely on engineering judgement to determine the requirements. Instead, we propose to use a systematic analysis of the safety case as the basis for determining the run-time monitoring requirements. Safety cases are created for AS prior to deployment in order to demonstrate why they are believed to be sufficiently safe to go into operation. The safety case is therefore inevitably based upon predictions and assumptions about the system and its operation which may become untrue due to changes post-deployment. Our approach identifies specific run-time monitoring requirements for AS based upon a dialectic analysis of the safety case developed for the system. The advantage of the approach described is that it is systematic (through explicit consideration of elements of the safety case for the AS) and provides a way to justify the sufficiency of the resulting monitoring requirements (through creating explicit links the safety claims made about the AS).