Safe and Dependable Autonomous Systems - Formal specification and verification

This PhD project is part of a research track that studies and develops a computing platform for trustworthy autonomous systems with provable characteristics for safety and resilience. In particular, this PhD project will study and assess the application STPA to the HARA of autonomous systems on three facets: (1) the suitability of STPA for determining and modelling the substantial sets of safety requirements for autonomous systems; (2) concepts and techniques for verifying the completeness and consistency of the safety requirements; (3) its ability to account for self-adaptive autonomous systems (e.g. due to machine learning and AI) - since we need to scope this proposal, we focus such adaptations to basic parameter updates. A use case of an AMR (Autonomous Mobile Robot) will be used to validate the research.