Autonomica: Ontological Modeling and Analysis of Autonomous Behavior

Abstract Model‐based system autonomy is a complex integration of planning from high‐level goals to low‐level command sequences whose execution controls a system. The need for autonomy has accelerated in recent years to enable complex missions in automotive, space, and defense. During system development, understanding the relationship between system autonomy and the physical environment (including hardware) is critical to supporting trade studies, developing concepts of operations, characterizing risk, and performing testing. This paper describes the initial results of developing Autonomica, an ontology‐based methodology and a framework for autonomous behavior modeling and analysis. This methodology formalizes an architectural pattern for specifying model‐based autonomy as a vocabulary with description logic semantics and provides authoring and analysis capabilities (reasoning, querying, and simulation) for the architectures. The framework implements the methodology in an integrated workbench. A running example of a hypothetical spacecraft mission to a small space body illustrates the ideas.