arXiv subjects

Andreas Rausch

Publications and source records attributed to Andreas Rausch.

47 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Connected Dependability Cage Approach for Safe Automated Driving

Automated driving systems can be helpful in a wide range of societal challenges, e.g., mobility-on-demand and transportation logistics for last-mile delivery, by aiding the vehicle driver or taking over the responsibility for the dynamic driving task partially or completely. Ensuring the safety of automated driving systems is no trivial task, even more so for those systems of SAE Level 3 or above. To achieve this, mechanisms are needed that can continuously monitor the system's operating conditions, also denoted as the system's operational design domain. This paper presents a safety concept for automated driving systems which uses a combination of onboard runtime monitoring via connected dependability cage and off-board runtime monitoring via a remote command control center, to continuously monitor the system's ODD. On one side, the connected dependability cage fulfills a double functionality: (1) to monitor continuously the operational design domain of the automated driving system, and (2) to transfer the responsibility in a smooth and safe manner between the automated driving system and the off-board remote safety driver, who is present in the remote command control center. On the other side, the remote command control center enables the remote safety driver the monitoring and takeover of the vehicle's control. We evaluate our safety concept for automated driving systems in a lab environment and on a test field track and report on results and lessons learned.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Assessment of the suitability of degradation models for the planning of CCTV inspections of sewer pipes

The degradation of sewer pipes poses significant economical, environmental and health concerns. The maintenance of such assets requires structured plans to perform inspections, which are more efficient when structural and environmental features are considered along with the results of previous inspection reports. The development of such plans requires degradation models that can be based on statistical and machine learning methods. This work proposes a methodology to assess their suitability to plan inspections considering three dimensions: accuracy metrics, ability to produce long-term degradation curves and explainability. Results suggest that although ensemble models yield the highest accuracy, they are unable to infer the long-term degradation of the pipes, whereas the Logistic Regression offers a slightly less accurate model that is able to produce consistent degradation curves with a high explainability. A use case is presented to demonstrate this methodology and the efficiency of model-based planning compared to the current inspection plan.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Runtime Safety Assurance of Autonomous Vehicles used for Last-mile Delivery in Urban Environments

Last-mile delivery of goods has gained a lot of attraction during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, current package delivery processes often lead to parking in the second lane, which in turn has negative effects on the urban environment in which the deliveries take place, i.e., traffic congestion and safety issues for other road users. To tackle these challenges, an effective autonomous delivery system is required that guarantees efficient, flexible and safe delivery of goods. The project LogiSmile, co-funded by EIT Urban Mobility, pilots an autonomous delivery vehicle dubbed the Autonomous Hub Vehicle (AHV) that works in cooperation with a small autonomous robot called the Autonomous Delivery Device (ADD). With the two cooperating robots, the project LogiSmile aims to find a possible solution to the challenges of urban goods distribution in congested areas and to demonstrate the future of urban mobility. As a member of Niedersächsische Forschungszentrum für Fahrzeugtechnik (NFF), the Institute for Software and Systems Engineering (ISSE) developed an integrated software safety architecture for runtime monitoring of the AHV, with (1) a dependability cage (DC) used for the on-board monitoring of the AHV, and (2) a remote command control center (CCC) which enables the remote off-board supervision of a fleet of AHVs. The DC supervises the vehicle continuously and in case of any safety violation, it switches the nominal driving mode to degraded driving mode or fail-safe mode. Additionally, the CCC also manages the communication of the AHV with the ADD and provides fail-operational solutions for the AHV when it cannot handle complex situations autonomously. The runtime monitoring concept developed for the AHV has been demonstrated in 2022 in Hamburg. We report on the obtained results and on the lessons learned.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Towards exploring adversarial learning for anomaly detection in complex driving scenes

One of the many Autonomous Systems (ASs), such as autonomous driving cars, performs various safety-critical functions. Many of these autonomous systems take advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to perceive their environment. But these perceiving components could not be formally verified, since, the accuracy of such AI-based components has a high dependency on the quality of training data. So Machine learning (ML) based anomaly detection, a technique to identify data that does not belong to the training data could be used as a safety measuring indicator during the development and operational time of such AI-based components. Adversarial learning, a sub-field of machine learning has proven its ability to detect anomalies in images and videos with impressive results on simple data sets. Therefore, in this work, we investigate and provide insight into the performance of such techniques on a highly complex driving scenes dataset called Berkeley DeepDrive.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

How to Extend the Abstraction Refinement Model for Systems with Emergent Behavior ?

The Abstraction Refinement Model has been widely adopted since it was firstly proposed many decades ago. This powerful model of software evolution process brings important properties into the system under development, properties such as the guarantee that no extra behavior (specifically harmful behaviors) will be observed once the system is deployed. However, perfect systems with such a guarantee are not a common thing to find in real world cases, anomalies and unspecified behaviors will always find a way to manifest in our systems, behaviors that are addressed in this paper with the name "emergent behavior". In this paper, we extend the Abstract Refinement Model to include the concept of the emergent behavior. Eventually, this should enable system developers to: (i) Concretely define what an emergent behavior is, (ii) help reason about the potential sources of the emergent behavior along the development process, which in return will help in controlling the emergent behavior at early steps of the development process.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Autoencoder-based Semantic Novelty Detection: Towards Dependable AI-based Systems

Many autonomous systems, such as driverless taxis, perform safety critical functions. Autonomous systems employ artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, specifically for the environment perception. Engineers cannot completely test or formally verify AI-based autonomous systems. The accuracy of AI-based systems depends on the quality of training data. Thus, novelty detection - identifying data that differ in some respect from the data used for training - becomes a safety measure for system development and operation. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for autoencoder-based semantic novelty detection with two innovations: architectural guidelines for a semantic autoencoder topology and a semantic error calculation as novelty criteria. We demonstrate that such a semantic novelty detection outperforms autoencoder-based novelty detection approaches known from literature by minimizing false negatives.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Tackling Software Architecture Erosion: Joint Architecture and Implementation Repairing by a Knowledge-based Approach

Architecture erosion is a big challenge in modern architectures leading to a deterioration of the quality properties of these systems. Today, no comprehensive approach for regaining architecture consistency in eroded software systems exists and architecture consistency is essentially achieved by repairing the implementation level only. In this paper, we propose a novel approach enabling a joint architecture and implementation repairing for tackling software architecture erosion. By using a holistic view on violation causes and suitable repair actions in combination with learning mechanisms we build up a project specific knowledge-base improving accuracy and efficiency in consolidation of architecture and implementation over time.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

Toward Mutual Trust Modeling in Human-Robot Collaboration

The recent revolution of intelligent systems made it possible for robots and autonomous systems to work alongside humans, collaborating with them and supporting them in many domains. It is undeniable that this interaction can have huge benefits for humans if it is designed properly. However, collaboration with humans requires a high level of cognition and social capabilities in order to gain humans acceptance. In all-human teams, mutual trust is the engine for successful collaboration. This applies to human-robot collaboration as well. Trust in this interaction controls over- and under-reliance. It can also mitigate some risk. Therefore, an appropriate trust level is essential for this new form of teamwork. Most research in this area has looked at trust of humans in machines, neglecting the mutuality of trust among collaboration partners. In this paper, we propose a trust model that incorporates this mutuality captures trust levels of both the human and the robot in real-time, so that robot can base actions on this, allowing for smoother, more natural interactions. This increases the human autonomy since the human does not need to monitor the robot behavior all the time.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2016

Towards the Verification of Safety-critical Autonomous Systems in Dynamic Environments

There is an increasing necessity to deploy autonomous systems in highly heterogeneous, dynamic environments, e.g. service robots in hospitals or autonomous cars on highways. Due to the uncertainty in these environments, the verification results obtained with respect to the system and environment models at design-time might not be transferable to the system behavior at run time. For autonomous systems operating in dynamic environments, safety of motion and collision avoidance are critical requirements. With regard to these requirements, Macek et al. [6] define the passive safety property, which requires that no collision can occur while the autonomous system is moving. To verify this property, we adopt a two phase process which combines static verification methods, used at design time, with dynamic ones, used at run time. In the design phase, we exploit UPPAAL to formalize the autonomous system and its environment as timed automata and the safety property as TCTL formula and to verify the correctness of these models with respect to this property. For the runtime phase, we build a monitor to check whether the assumptions made at design time are also correct at run time. If the current system observations of the environment do not correspond to the initial system assumptions, the monitor sends feedback to the system and the system enters a passive safe state.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2014

Modeling Dynamic Component Interfaces

We adopt a component model based on object-oriented systems, introducing the concepts of components and their structure. A component consists of a dynamically changing set of connected objects. Only some of these objects are interface objects, and are thus accessible from the environment. During the component lifetime not only the number of objects, but also that of interface objects, and their connections change. To describe this situation, we introduce component interface diagrams (CIDs)-an adaption of UML diagrams-as a notation to characterize interfaces of components, their structure, and their navigability. We show how CIDs can be used to describe the in-house developed Open Editor Framework (OEF). Finally, we give guidelines that allow to map components described with CIDs directly to several component technologies, like ActiveX, CORBA, or Java Beans

cs.SE↗

arXiv2014

Orchestration of Global Software Engineering Projects

Global software engineering has become a fact in many companies due to real necessity in practice. In contrast to co-located projects global projects face a number of additional software engineering challenges. Among them quality management has become much more difficult and schedule and budget overruns can be observed more often. Compared to co-located projects global software engineering is even more challenging due to the need for integration of different cultures, different languages, and different time zones - across companies, and across countries. The diversity of development locations on several levels seriously endangers an effective and goal-oriented progress of projects. In this position paper we discuss reasons for global development, sketch settings for distribution and views of orchestration of dislocated companies in a global project that can be seen as a "virtual project environment". We also present a collection of questions, which we consider relevant for global software engineering. The questions motivate further discussion to derive a research agenda in global software engineering.

cs.SE↗