Handling Uncertainty in Collaborative Embedded Systems Engineering

As collaborative embedded systems operate autonomously in highly dynamic contexts, they must be able to handle uncertainties that can occur during operation. On the one hand, they must be able to handle uncertainties due to the imprecision of sensors and the behavior of data-driven components for perceiving and interpreting the context to enable decisions to be made during operation. On the other hand, uncertainties can emerge from the collaboration in a collaborative group, related to the exchange of information (e.g., context knowledge) between collaborative systems. This chapter presents methods for modeling uncertainty early in development and analyzing uncertainty during both design and operation. These methods allow for the identification of epistemic uncertainties that can occur when various, potentially heterogeneous systems are required to collaborate. The methods also enable graphical and formal modeling of uncertainties and their impact on system behavior (e.g., in the course of dynamic traffic scenarios). Furthermore, this chapter investigates the quality of outputs issued by data-driven models used to equip collaborative embedded systems with uncertainty-resilient machine learning capability.