Abstract
Autonomy is the core capability of future systems, and architecture design is one of the critical issues in system development and implementation. To discuss the architecture of autonomous systems in the future, this paper reviews the developing progress of architectures from automation systems to autonomous systems. Firstly, the autonomy and autonomous systems in different fields are summarized. The article classifies and summarizes the architecture of typical automated systems and infer three suggestions for building an autonomous system architecture: extensibility, evolvability, and collaborability. Accordingly, this paper builds an autonomous waterborne transportation system, and the architecture is composed of the object layer, cyberspace layer, cognition layer, and application layer, the proposed suggestions made in the construction of the architecture are reflected in the inter-relationships at all layers. Through the cooperation of four layers, the autonomous waterborne transportation system can autonomously complete the system functions, such as system control and transportation service. In the end, the characteristics of autonomous systems are concluded, from which the future primary research directions and the challenges of autonomous systems are provided.
Highlights
In the architecture designed in this article, physical entities of different levels of autonomy can quickly complete the mapping from physical space to digital and information space through the designed universal digital entity, to digitize and network all traffic participation objects in the traffic system through digital twin technology, which is conducive to the organization and expression of knowledge in the domain according to the needs of the application space
The operation of the autonomous system still needs participation in high-level human behavior decision-making, and the autonomous system can be realized by human-computer integration
Based on the above characteristics, in constructing the autonomous system architecture, we put forward that more attention should be paid to its extensibility, evolvability, and collaborability
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The Defense Science Council of the United States issued a vital guidance document entitled the status of autonomy in the Department of defense unmanned system with obvious goal concerning the improvement of systems’ autonomy capability [2] in which the importance of autonomous capability for systems, especially for unmanned systems, is highlighted It can be seen from the above analysis that autonomy has been the hotpot research direction in promising automation, even intelligence of individuals and systems. Through the design of architecture, the perception ability of the system can be enhanced, the effectiveness and accuracy of the autonomous object design can be improved, and the actionability of the system to achieve the established goals can be enhanced It can enhance the self-adaptive and self-learning ability of the system. The key technical challenges of autonomous systems are discussed
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