A formal approach to designing autonomous systems: from Intelligent Transport Systems to Autonomous Robots

 

Emerging transport systems involve more and more fully automatic parts that communicate together in order to optimise traffic and security. Such systems are highly distributed, mobile and require physical constraints to be taken into account. The communicating entities may be included in vehicles or the infrastructure ; they must comply with real time and real space constraints ; they should also have some autonomous behaviour in case of e.g. network failure. The systems designed should be proved reliable before being put in operation. We propose to use formal specification and verification techniques for designing these models, prior to any costly hardware implementation. Such techniques could be applied to modular robot systems that have similarities in their structure (peer-to-peer approach and structure) with Intelligent Transport Systems.