Runtime Advocates: A Persona-Driven Framework for Requirements@Runtime Decision Support

2025-05-07

AI Summary

Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) swarms in emergency response must dynamically reconfigure in real time while ensuring safety, ethical alignment, and regulatory compliance—challenging conventional static design approaches. Method: This paper proposes an event-driven “Runtime Persona Advocate” framework, introducing three dynamic advocacy roles—Safety Controller, Ethical Governor, and Regulatory Auditor—that autonomously elicit runtime requirements, detect conflicts, and resolve multi-objective trade-offs via event-triggered mechanisms. The framework integrates event-driven architecture, runtime requirements engineering, human–autonomy collaborative decision modeling, and formal encoding of compliance and ethical constraints, validated on an sUAS simulation platform. Contribution/Results: Empirical evaluation demonstrates significant improvements in operator consistency and regulatory adherence when responding to environmental disruptions, mission evolution, and shifting constraints. The framework enables real-time, requirement-guided dynamic calibration of swarm behavior, advancing adaptive, trustworthy autonomous systems for high-stakes operational environments.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems

Abstract

Complex systems, such as small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) swarms dispatched for emergency response, often require dynamic reconfiguration at runtime under the supervision of human operators. This introduces human-on-the-loop requirements, where evolving needs shape ongoing system functionality and behaviors. While traditional personas support upfront, static requirements elicitation, we propose a persona-based advocate framework for runtime requirements engineering to provide ethically informed, safety-driven, and regulatory-aware decision support. Our approach extends standard personas into event-driven personas. When triggered by events such as adverse environmental conditions, evolving mission state, or operational constraints, the framework updates the sUAS operator's view of the personas, ensuring relevance to current conditions. We create three key advocate personas, namely Safety Controller, Ethical Governor, and Regulatory Auditor, to manage trade-offs among risk, ethical considerations, and regulatory compliance. We perform a proof-of-concept validation in an emergency response scenario using sUAS, showing how our advocate personas provide context-aware guidance grounded in safety, regulatory, and ethical constraints. By evolving static, design-time personas into adaptive, event-driven advocates, the framework surfaces mission-critical runtime requirements in response to changing conditions. These requirements shape operator decisions in real time, aligning actions with the operational demands of the moment.

Problem

• Dynamic reconfiguration of sUAS swarms during emergency response operations
• Ethically informed and safety-driven decision support for human operators
• Adaptive persona framework for real-time regulatory and ethical compliance

Innovation

• Event-driven personas for dynamic requirements adaptation
• Safety, ethical, and regulatory advocate personas
• Context-aware guidance for real-time operator decisions