A rule-based smart control for fail-operational systems

Abstract

When systems become smarter they have to cope with faults occurring during operation in an intelligent way. For example, an autonomous vehicle has to react appropriately in case of a fault occurring during driving on a highway in order to assure safety for passengers and other humans in its surrounding. Hence, there is a need for fail-operational systems that extend the concept of fail-safety. In this paper, we introduce a method that relies on rules for controlling a system. The rules specify the behavior of the system including behavioral redundancies. In addition, the method provides a runtime execution engine that selects the rules accordingly to reach a certain goal. In addition, we present a language and an implementation of the method and discuss its capabilities using a case study from the mobile robotics domain. In particular, we show how the rule-based fail-operational system can adapt to a fault occurring at runtime.