Abstract
We propose an adversarial, time-varying test-synthesis procedure for safety-critical systems without requiring specific knowledge of the underlying controller steering the system. From a broader test and evaluation context, determination of difficult tests of system behavior is important as these tests would elucidate problematic system phenomena before these mistakes can engender problematic outcomes, e.g. loss of human life in autonomous cars, costly failures for airplane systems, etc. Our approach builds on existing, simulation-based work in the test and evaluation literature by offering a controller-agnostic test-synthesis procedure that provides a series of benchmark tests with which to determine controller reliability. To achieve this, our approach codifies the system objective as a timed reach-avoid specification. Then, by coupling control barrier functions with this class of specifications, we construct an instantaneous difficulty metric whose minimizer corresponds to the most difficult test at that system state. We use this instantaneous difficulty metric in a game-theoretic fashion, to produce an adversarial, time-varying test-synthesis procedure that does not require specific knowledge of the system's controller, but can still provably identify realizable and maximally difficult tests of system behavior. Finally, we develop this test-synthesis procedure for both continuous and discrete-time systems and showcase our test-synthesis procedure on simulated and hardware examples.
Abstract (translated)
我们提出了一种对抗性、时间可变的实验合成程序,用于关键系统的安全级别,而无需特定了解控制系统。从更广泛的测试和评估背景中,确定系统行为困难的测试非常重要,因为这些测试将在这些错误产生问题之前阐明有问题的系统现象,例如自动驾驶汽车中的生命损失、飞机系统的昂贵失败等。我们的方法是在测试和评估文献中现有的模拟工作基础上建立的,我们提供了控制器无关的实验合成程序,提供了一组基准测试以确定控制器的可靠性。为了实现这一点,我们的方法是将系统目标编码为时间到达的规格要求。然后,通过耦合控制屏障功能,我们构造了一个即时的难度度量,其最小值对应于该系统状态的最困难测试。我们使用这个即时的难度度量,以博弈论的方式生成一种对抗性、时间可变的实验合成程序,无需系统控制器的特定知识,但仍可证明可实现和非常困难的系统行为测试。最后,我们开发了连续时间和离散时间系统的实验合成程序,并展示了我们的实验合成程序的模拟和硬件例子。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.09622
