Resilience and Antifragility of Autonomous Systems

In healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, and many other domains, autonomous systems have the potential to undertake or support complex missions that are dangerous, difficult, or tedious for humans. However, to achieve this potential, autonomous systems must be resilient: they must continue to provide the required functionality despite the anticipated and unforeseen disturbances encountered within their operating environments. This ability to achieve user goals in open-world environments can be further increased by making autonomous systems antifragile. Antifragile systems benefit from exposure to uncertainty and disturbances, by learning from encounters with such difficulties, so that they can handle their future occurrences faster, more efficiently, with lower user impact, etc. This Dagstuhl Seminar brought together leading researchers and practitioners with expertise in autonomous system resilience, antifragility, safety and ethics, self-adaptive systems, and formal methods, with the aim to: (1) develop and document a common understanding of resilient and antifragile autonomous systems (RAAS); (2) identify open challenges for RAAS; (3) discuss promising preliminary approaches; and (4) propose a research agenda for addressing these challenges.