Towards a Model-Driven Continuous Assurance Framework for Autonomous Systems

AAMAS 2026 Workshop EMAS Submission42 Authors

Keywords: Continuous assurance, formal verification, assurance cases, model-driven engineering

Abstract: Autonomous systems must sustain justified confidence in their correctness and safety throughout their operational lifecycle. Traditional assurance methods separate development-time assurance from runtime assurance, yielding fragmented arguments that cannot adapt to runtime changes or system updates. Towards addressing this, we propose a unified \emph{Continuous Assurance Framework} integrating design-time, runtime, and evolution-time assurance within a traceable, model-driven workflow, and instantiate its design-time phase using two formal verification methods: RoboChart for functional correctness and PRISM for probabilistic risk analysis. We also propose a model-driven transformation pipeline, implemented as an Eclipse plugin, that automatically regenerates structured assurance arguments whenever formal \emph{specifications} or their \emph{verification} results change, ensuring traceability. We demonstrate our approach on a nuclear inspection robot scenario, and discuss alignment with regulator-endorsed best practices.

Paper Type: Regular paper

Demo: No, we do not plan to present a demo.

Email Sharing: We authorize the sharing of all author emails with Program Chairs.

Data Release: We authorize the release of our submission and author names to the public in the event of acceptance.

Submission Number: 42