arXiv subjects

Maike Schwammberger

Publications and source records attributed to Maike Schwammberger.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

In Terms of Explainability: Refining Requirements for Self-Explainable Systems

Autonomous and software-intensive systems have been growing in occurrence, complexity, and assumed responsibility. Due to the high complexity of these systems, properties like transparency and explainability must be a focus of investigation. To date, no universally applicable definition and guide for the development of (self-)explainable systems exists. A need for explainability standards has already been recognized in the EU AI Act and the IEEE Transparency Standard 7001-2021. To address this need, we propose unified definitions in explainability based on an analysis and combination of existing definitions. Additionally, we present structured explainability requirements that are necessary to build (self-)explainable systems. By analysing the resulting taxonomy, we propose the incorporation of explanation goodness and thus correctness of explanations into the unified definitions. With our approach, we support the development of formal standards for (self-)explainable systems. Establishing such a uniform taxonomy also is a beneficial step towards certifying or auditing explainable systems.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems: Challenges and Solutions

Engineering reliable autonomous systems is an important and growing topic in computer science. As autonomous systems become more prevalent, easy-to-use techniques for building them reliably are increasingly important. This workshop report captures and expands on the discussions at the Lorentz Center Workshop "Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems" (ERAS), held from 10 to 14 June 2024. The workshop was co-organised by the organisers of the Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS) and the Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA). It brought together members of the FMAS and AREA communities, industry practitioners, and representatives from sectors where autonomous systems pose distinctive engineering challenges. The workshop focused on three main research topics: techniques for verification and validation of autonomous systems; engineering real-world autonomous systems; and software architectures for safe autonomous systems. Its main outcome is a catalogue of challenges in these areas and, most importantly, a pathway to solutions. Some challenges can already be tackled by techniques that are well known in academia but have not yet become regularly used in practice. Other challenges remain unresolved and require further research. This roadmap is intended to support future research and industrial collaboration.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

ROBOPOL: Social Robotics Meets Vehicular Communications for Cooperative Automated Driving

On the way toward full autonomy, sharing roads between automated and autonomous vehicles in so-called mixed traffic is unavoidable. Moreover, even if all vehicles on the road were autonomous, pedestrians would still cross streets. We propose social robots as moderators between autonomous vehicles and vulnerable road users. This paper presents a first proof-of-concept integration of a social robot advising pedestrians in crossing scenarios involving a cooperative automated vehicle. We also discuss key enablers required for designing "robot policeman" in a generic use case of cooperative intersection management. Our work provides a vision of the role of social robotics in future Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Proceedings Seventh International Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems

This EPTCS volume contains the papers from the Seventh International Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS 2025), which was held between the 17th and 19th of November 2025. The goal of the FMAS workshop series is to bring together leading researchers who are using formal methods to tackle the unique challenges that autonomous systems present, so that they can publish and discuss their work with a growing community of researchers. FMAS 2025 was co-located with the 20th International Conference on integrated Formal Methods (iFM'25), hosted by Inria Paris, France at the Inria Paris Center. In total, FMAS 2025 received 16 submissions from researchers at institutions in: Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom. Though we received fewer submissions than last year, we are encouraged to see the submissions being sent from a wide range of countries. Submissions come from both past and new FMAS authors, which shows us that the existing community appreciates the network that FMAS has built over the past 7 years, while new authors also show the FMAS community's great potential of growth.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2025

Designing Value-Aligned Traffic Agents through Conflict Sensitivity

Autonomous traffic agents (ATAs) are expected to act in ways tat are not only safe, but also aligned with stakeholder values across legal, social, and moral dimensions. In this paper, we adopt an established formal model of conflict from epistemic game theory to support the development of such agents. We focus on value conflicts-situations in which agents face competing goals rooted in value-laden situations and show how conflict analysis can inform key phases of the design process. This includes value elicitation, capability specification, explanation, and adaptive system refinement. We elaborate and apply the concept of Value-Aligned Operational Design Domains (VODDs) to structure autonomy in accordance with contextual value priorities. Our approach shifts the emphasis from solving moral dilemmas at runtime to anticipating and structuring value-sensitive behaviour during development.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2023

Proceedings Fifth International Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems

This EPTCS volume contains the proceedings for the Fifth International Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS 2023), which was held on the 15th and 16th of November 2023. FMAS 2023 was co-located with 18th International Conference on integrated Formal Methods (iFM) (iFM'22), organised by Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science of Leiden University. The workshop itself was held at Scheltema Leiden, a renovated 19th Century blanket factory alongside the canal. FMAS 2023 received 25 submissions. We received 11 regular papers, 3 experience reports, 6 research previews, and 5 vision papers. The researchers who submitted papers to FMAS 2023 were from institutions in: Australia, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. Increasing our number of submissions for the third year in a row is an encouraging sign that FMAS has established itself as a reputable publication venue for research on the formal modelling and verification of autonomous systems. After each paper was reviewed by three members of our Programme Committee we accepted a total of 15 papers: 8 long papers and 7 short papers.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

From Specification Models to Explanation Models: An Extraction and Refinement Process for Timed Automata

Autonomous systems control many tasks in our daily lives. To increase trust in those systems and safety of the interaction between humans and autonomous systems, the system behaviour and reasons for autonomous decision should be explained to users, experts and public authorities. One way to provide such explanations is to use behavioural models to generate context- and user-specific explanations at run-time. However, this comes at the cost of higher modelling effort as additional models need to be constructed. In this paper, we propose a high-level process to extract such explanation models from system models, and to subsequently refine these towards specific users, explanation purposes and situations. By this, we enable the reuse of specification models for integrating self-explanation capabilities into systems. We showcase our approach using a running example from the autonomous driving domain.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Towards a Digital Highway Code using Formal Modelling and Verification of Timed Automata

One of the challenges in designing safe, reliable and trustworthy Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) is to ensure that the AVs abide by traffic rules. For this, the AVs need to be able to understand and reason about traffic rules. In previous work, we introduce the spatial traffic logic USL-TR to allow for the unambiguous, machine-readable, formalisation of traffic rules. This is only the first step towards autonomous traffic agents that verifiably follow traffic rules. In this research preview, we focus on two further steps: a) retrieving behaviour diagrams directly from traffic rules and b) converting the behaviour diagrams into timed automata that are using formulae of USL-TR in guards and invariants. With this, we have a formal representation for traffic rules and can move towards the establishment of a Digital Highway Code. We briefly envision further steps which include adding environment and agent models to the timed automata to finally implement and verify these traffic rule models using a selection of formal verification tools.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2022

Integrating Formal Verification and Simulation-based Assertion Checking in a Corroborative V&V Process

Automated Vehicles (AVs) are rapidly maturing in the transportation domain. However, the complexity of the AV design problem is such that no single technique is sufficient to provide adequate validation of key properties such as safety, reliability or trustworthiness. In this vision paper, a combination of a spatial traffic logic and agent-based verification methods with a validation method that uses assertion checking of simulations is proposed. We sketch how to integrate the respective approaches within a methodological framework called Corroborative Verification and Validation (V&V).The Corroborative V&V framework identifies three different verification and validation levels for AVs (formal verification, simulation-based testing, real-world experiments) and specifies connections and evidence between these levels. We define specifications for the formal relationships that must be established between processes, system models and requirements models for the evidence from formal design verification and simulation-based testing to corroborate each other and enhance assurance confidence from verification and validation.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Extending Urban Multi-Lane Spatial Logic to Formalise Road Junction Rules

During the design of autonomous vehicles (AVs), several stages should include a verification process to guarantee that the AV is driving safely on the roads. One of these stages is to assure the AVs abide by the road traffic rules. To include road traffic rules in the design of an AV, a precise and unambiguous formalisation of these rules is needed. However, only recently this has been pointed out as an issue for the design of AVs and the few works on this only capture the temporal aspects of the rules, leaving behind the spatial aspects. Here, we extend the spatial traffic logic, Urban Multi-lane Spatial Logic, to formalise a subset of the UK road junction rules, where both temporal and spatial aspects of the rules are captured. Our approach has an abstraction level for urban road junctions that could easily promote the formalisation of the whole set of road junction rules and we exemplarily formalise three of the UK road junction rules. Once we have the whole set formalised, we will model, implement, and formally verify the behaviour of an AV against road traffic rules so that guidelines for the creation of a Digital Highway Code for AVs can be established.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2019

Towards Self-Explainable Cyber-Physical Systems

With the increasing complexity of CPSs, their behavior and decisions become increasingly difficult to understand and comprehend for users and other stakeholders. Our vision is to build self-explainable systems that can, at run-time, answer questions about the system's past, current, and future behavior. As hitherto no design methodology or reference framework exists for building such systems, we propose the MAB-EX framework for building self-explainable systems that leverage requirements- and explainability models at run-time. The basic idea of MAB-EX is to first Monitor and Analyze a certain behavior of a system, then Build an explanation from explanation models and convey this EXplanation in a suitable way to a stakeholder. We also take into account that new explanations can be learned, by updating the explanation models, should new and yet un-explainable behavior be detected by the system.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2018

Introducing Liveness into Multi-lane Spatial Logic lane change controllers using UPPAAL

With Multi-lane Spatial Logic (MLSL) a powerful approach to formally reason about and prove safety of autonomous traffic manoeuvres was introduced. Extended timed automata controllers using MLSL were constructed to commit safe lane change manoeuvres on highways. However, the approach has only few implementation and verification results. We thus strenghen the MLSL approach by implementing their lane change controller in UPPAAL and confirming the safety of the lane change protocol. We also detect the unlive behaviour of the original controller and thus extend it to finally verify liveness of the new lane change controller.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2017

Imperfect Knowledge in Autonomous Urban Traffic Manoeuvres

Urban Multi-lane Spatial Logic (UMLSL) was introduced in [13] for proving safety (collision freedom) in autonomous urban traffic manoeuvres with perfect knowledge. We now consider a concept of imperfect knowledge, where cars have less information about other cars. To this end, we introduce the concept of a multi-view and propose crossing controllers using broadcast communication with data constraints for turning manoeuvres at intersections.

cs.LO↗