The concept of autonomy is key to the IoT vision promising increasing integration of smart services and systems minimizing human intervention. This vision challenges our capability to build complex open trustworthy autonomous systems. We lack a rigorous common semantic framework for autonomous systems. There is currently a lot of confusion regarding the main characteristics of autonomous systems. In the literature, we find a profusion of poorly understood “self”-prefixed terms related to autonomy such as Self-healing, Self-optimization, Self-protection, Self-awareness, Self-organization etc. It is remarkable that the debate about autonomous vehicles focuses almost exclusively on AI and learning techniques while it ignores many other equally important autonomous system design issues.

Autonomous systems involve agents and objects coordinated in some common ambiguous and uncertain environment so that their collective behavior meets a set of global goals. We propose a general computational model combining a system architecture model and an agent model. The architecture model allows expression of dynamic reconfigurable multi-mode coordination between components. The agent model consists of five interacting modules implementing each one a characteristic feature: perception, reflection, goal management, planning and self-adaptation. It determines a concept of autonomic complexity accounting for the specific difficulty to build autonomous systems.

We emphasize that the main characteristic of autonomous systems is their ability to handle knowledge and adaptively respond to environment changes. A main conclusion is that autonomy should be associated with functionality and not with specific techniques. Machine learning is essential for autonomy although it can meet only a small portion of the needs implied by autonomous system design. We conclude that autonomy is a kind of broad intelligence. Building trustworthy and optimal autonomous systems goes far beyond the AI challenge.

 

 

 

 

Joseph Sifakis is Emeritus Senior CNRS Researcher at Verimag. His current research interests cover fundamental and applied aspects of embedded systems design. The main focus of his work is on the formalization of system design as a process leading from given requirements to trustworthy, optimized and correct-by-construction implementations. In 2007, Joseph Sifakis has received the Turing Award for his contribution to the theory and application of model checking, the most widely used system verification technique today.

Joseph Sifakis is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, a member of the French National Academy of Engineering and a member of Academia European and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is a Grand Officer of the French National Order of Merit, a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. He has received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2012. He has received in 2009 the Award of the Hellenic Parliament Foundation for Parliamentarism and Democracy. He is a commander of the Greek Order of the Phoenix.