Workshop: “Autonomous Systems: Legal/Regulatory Aspects and Verification & Validation”
Date: 22nd February 2016
Context: organised by the EPSRC’s Network on the Verification and Validation of Autonomous Systems
Location: University of Liverpool in London, 33 Finsbury Square, London, EC2A 1AG
Summary: There are many different regulatory/standards frameworks that will be affected by increasing “autonomy” in systems, vehicles, or robots. There are also many different verification and validation (V&V) techniques being developed in universities and aiming to tackling this new dimension. This workshop will bring together a variety of experts from across these organisations to help highlight the most appropriate directions, both for the immediate future and in the longer term. To ensure that new techniques being developed will eventually be practical enough to be useful in a regulatory context, academics need input from regulators. In general the software that will be employed in the future can *autonomously* do anything the human operator/driver/pilot could have done, so how would regulators wish to assess whether this software is actually doing what is required?
Format: There will be a range of speakers from bodies concerned with regulation/standards: Rail Safety and Standards Board; Civil Aviation Authority; British Standards Institution; Office for Nuclear Regulation; Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles; etc. We are asking each to consider the future:
- imagine that software/systems can replicate/replace any of the human capabilities in your sector/applications
- how do your safety/regulatory frameworks deal with such complex software?
- now imagine that these software/systems can autonomously make any/all of the decisions that a human driver/operator/engineer usually makes
- do your current safety/regulatory frameworks already cover this?
- if not what is needed to cover these situations, and are there limits beyond which the replacement of human decision-making by autonomous software decisions will never go?
There will also be several speakers describing academic directions and validation facilities.
EPSRC: The main workshop will end at 16:00 but from 16:00-17:00, EPSRC will be hosting a session for academics interested in providing input to the “balancing capability” activity.