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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 126 - Virtual - March 2021
Agenda Location	8 SUBCOMMITTEE D – DYNAMICS, COMPUTATIONS, AND ANALYSIS 8.1 Run Time Assurance
Title	Run Time Assurance
Presenter	John Schierman
Affiliation	AFRL
Available Downloads*	presentation
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Abstract	There has been wide interest in applying runtime assurance (RTA) protection to advanced systems for nearly two decades. Significant R&D investment by both the Air Force and NASA have matured many aspects of RTA systems. Yet, this is not a solved problem, and further R&D is needed to advanced RTA technology to the levels required for its certification, implementation, and fielding on commercial and military aerospace applications. This talk will cover the background of RTA and present areas needed for further development. As interest in adaptive control systems and intelligent autonomy grew, it became apparent that advances in verification and validation (V&V) technologies were going to be required if these new systems were to be certified for operation. Advances in formal methods give new tools for design-time V&V of these cutting-edge concepts. Yet, it is widely recognized that RTA will also be a necessary part of the overall solution towards trusted systems. RTA provides protection from errors in advanced functions not discovered during design-time V&V by 1) continually monitoring critical system states, 2) determining whether the system is safe and operating correctly, 3) if not, switching to a trusted, albeit less capable reversionary function, and 4) allowing the reversionary system to recover to a safe/correct condition. Current fielded RTA systems are broadly considered too conservative and new, practical methods for constructing more accurate switching conditions are needed. Other key areas requiring further R&D are: 1) reversionary system design; 2) integration with hardware health monitoring and redundancy management; 3) multiple interacting RTA functions and RTA applied to complex cyber-physical systems; 4) reducing RTA complexity and certification of RTA protected systems. The concept of runtime assurance was first introduced in the 1990s. Interest in this idea grew rapidly because it seemed to hold the promise of circumventing complex and expensive V&V of advanced systems by introducing a simple switch to a trusted backup system. However, research has proven that this is not always the case. Although there are certain applications in which RTA can provide significant benefit, especially under highly controlled or specific use cases, introduction of complex RTA architectures to complicated systems can lead to diminishing benefits. RTA is not the panacea hoped for to solve all the certification problems of new and envisioned intelligent systems.