Abstract
We present the Distributed Simplex Architecture (DSA), a new runtime assurance technique that provides safety guarantees for multi-agent systems (MASs). DSA is inspired by the Simplex control architecture of Sha et al., but with some significant differences. The traditional Simplex approach is limited to single-agent systems or a MAS with a centralized control scheme. DSA addresses this limitation by extending the scope of Simplex to include MASs under distributed control. In DSA, each agent runs a local instance of traditional Simplex such that the preservation of safety in the local instances implies safety for the entire MAS. Control Barrier Functions play a critical role. They are used to define DSA’s core components (the baseline controller and the decision module’s switching logic between advanced and baseline controllers) and to verify the safety of a DSA instance in a distributed manner. We provide a general proof of safety for DSA, and present experimental results for several case studies, including flocking with collision avoidance, safe navigation of ground rovers through way-points, and the safe operation of a microgrid.
This work is supported in part by NSF awards OIA-2040599, CCF-1918225, CCF-1954837, CPS-1446832 and ONR award N000142012751.
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Mehmood, U., Stoller, S.D., Grosu, R., Roy, S., Damare, A., Smolka, S.A. (2021). A Distributed Simplex Architecture for Multi-agent Systems. In: Qin, S., Woodcock, J., Zhang, W. (eds) Dependable Software Engineering. Theories, Tools, and Applications. SETTA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13071. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91265-9_13
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