Autonomous Systems Design: Charting a New Discipline

Abstract

Autonomous systems act independently and solve complex tasks without human intervention, and they are able to learn and adapt to an evolving environment. These capabilities of autonomous systems promise significant benefits and disruption potential in many domains such as mobility, production systems, healthcare, smart home and smart energy systems. As these domains are classical cyber-physical system (CPS) domains, autonomous systems inherit strict dependability requirements (e.g. safety, security, availability or real-time) from these systems. Assuring these requirements poses a major challenge on the way to broad market introduction as can be seen e.g. by roadmaps for autonomous driving systems which are currently stretched farther out.