Decision Assurance for Critical Infrastructure Systems
Keywords:
Autonomous Decision Assurance, Mission-Critical Ecosystems, Safety-Critical Autonomy, Verifiable Governance Architecture, Trustworthy Autonomous Operations, Real-Time Assurance Validation, Data Provenance Management, Autonomous Infrastructure Resilience, Intelligent Risk Mitigation, Formal Assurance Frameworks.Abstract
Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed across sensitive, high-stakes domains, removing people from the immediate vicinity of hazardous operations. Yet decisions made without human intervention must match the reliability, safety, and accountability of those made by experienced human experts — particularly in mission-critical environments where perception, planning, and action may be outsourced to untrusted suppliers or based on inadequate, suspect, or even malicious data. Assurance requirements in such ecosystems must be specified and verified either a priori or in real time.
This paper presents a transparent, verifiable architecture for autonomous decision assurance, layered to support a coherent set of governance structures, standards, and practices at each level. Implementation and operational assurance rest on a formal specification, supported by assurance techniques matched to a declared assurance level and aligned with the evidence available. Because the safety, reliability, and accountability of autonomous decisions depend on data that is fit for purpose, trustworthy governance of that data — underpinned by adequate provenance and lineage — is treated as a core requirement rather than an afterthought. The architecture's relevance and applicability are demonstrated across representative domains and operational scenarios, including utility networks, road and rail transportation, water distribution and treatment, communications, energy, and healthcare.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Tanja Schultz (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
