On the Practices of Autonomous Systems Development: Survey-based Empirical Findings

2025-06-04

AI Summary

Current development practices for autonomous systems lack systematic empirical investigation, hindered by dynamically evolving application scenarios and domain-specific industrial constraints. Method: This paper presents the first longitudinal empirical study, conducting an anonymous, multi-industry expert survey in 2019, integrating qualitative and quantitative analysis to examine real-world industrial practices in model-based software engineering (MBSwE) and reuse for autonomous systems. Contribution/Results: The study systematically characterizes development processes, standards adoption, and verification and validation (V&V) practices; identifies critical verification bottlenecks and process adaptation barriers; and—crucially—establishes the first comparable, traceable baseline dataset of autonomous system development practices. This dataset enables rigorous longitudinal comparison and evidence-based evolution of development methods and standards.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Other Foundations of Multi Agent Systems
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Autonomous systems have gained an important role in many industry domains and are beginning to change everyday life. However, due to dynamically emerging applications and often proprietary constraints, there is a lack of information about the practice of developing autonomous systems. This paper presents the first part of the longitudinal study focused on establishing state-of-the-practice, identifying and quantifying the challenges and benefits, identifying the processes and standards used, and exploring verification and validation (V&V) practices used for the development of autonomous systems. The results presented in this paper are based on data about software systems that have autonomous functionality and may employ model-based software engineering (MBSwE) and reuse. These data were collected using an anonymous online survey that was administered in 2019 and were provided by experts with experience in development of autonomous systems and /or the use of MBSwE. Our current work is focused on repeating the survey to collect more recent data and discover how the development of autonomous systems has evolved over time.

Problem

• Lack of information on autonomous systems development practices
• Identifying challenges and benefits in autonomous systems development
• Exploring verification and validation practices for autonomous systems

Innovation

• Survey-based empirical study on autonomous systems
• Model-based software engineering and reuse
• Longitudinal study on V&V practices