ASSURING THE ROBUSTNESS AND RESILIENCY OF LEARNING-ENABLED AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS

As Learning-Enabled Systems (LESs) have become more prevalent in safety-critical applications, addressing the assurance of LESs has become increasingly important. Because machine learning models in LESs are not explicitly programmed like traditional software, developers typically have less direct control over the inferences learned by LESs, relying instead on semantically valid and complete patterns to be extracted from the system’s exposure to the environment. As such, the behavior of an LES is strongly dependent on the quality of its training experience. However, run-time environments are often noisy or not well-defined. Uncertainty in the behavior of an LES can arise when there is inadequate coverage of relevant training/test cases (e.g., corner cases). It is challenging to assure safety-critical LESs will perform as expected when exposed to run-time conditions that have never been experienced during training or validation. This doctoral research contributes automated methods to improve the robustness and resilience of an LES. For this work, a robust LES is less sensitive to noise in the environment, and a resilient LES is able to self-adapt to adverse run-time contexts in order to mitigate system failure. The proposed methods harness diversity-driven evolution-based methods, machine learning, and software assurance cases to train robust LESs, uncover robust system configurations, and foster resiliency through self-adaptation and predictive behavior modeling. This doctoral work demonstrates these capabilities by applying the proposed framework to deep learning and autonomous cyber-physical systems.