Designing human-in-the-loop autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems

Even though full autonomy in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) is a challenge that has been confronted in different application domains and industrial sectors, the current scenario still requires human intervention in these autonomous systems in order to accomplish tasks that are better performed with human-in-the-loop. Humans, machines, and software systems are required to interact and understand each other in order to work together in an effective and robust way. This human integration introduces an important number of challenges and problems to be solved in order to achieve seamless and solid participation. To manage this complexity, appropriate techniques and methods must be used to help CPS developers analyze and design this kind of human-in-the-loop integration. The goal of this paper is to identify the technological challenges and limitations of integrating humans into the CPSs autonomy loop and to break new ground for design solutions in order to develop what we call HiL-ACPS systems. This work defines a conceptual framework to characterize the cooperation between humans and autonomous CPSs and provides techniques for applying the framework in order to design proper human integration. The emergent autonomous car domain is considered as a running example. It covers some of the current limitations of involving drivers into the autonomous functionalities. Finally, to validate the proposal, an autonomous car prototype was built applying the conceptual framework. This prototype was evaluated to check whether the human integration implemented behaves as defined in its specification.