FormIDEAble: Safe and Socially-aware Autonomous Systems

2026-06-30

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of simultaneously modeling human social behaviors and providing formal safety guarantees in safety-critical human-robot collaboration scenarios. The authors propose a unified framework that formulates collaborative decision-making as a Priced Timed Markov Decision Process (Priced Timed MDP) and integrates bounded reachability analysis to synthesize policies that are both socially aware and provably safe. By uniquely combining formal verification, social behavior modeling, and cost-constrained decision-making, the approach enables a controllable trade-off between safety assurance and task performance. Its effectiveness is demonstrated in an emergency evacuation scenario, offering a reliable foundation for decision-making in high-risk human-robot systems.

Abstract

Autonomous agents operating in socio-critical settings must coordinate with humans under uncertainty while respecting explicit safety constraints. Existing approaches either account for social dynamics without formal guarantees or provide formal assurance while abstracting away human behaviour. We introduce FormIDEAble, a formally grounded approach for synthesising socially-aware cooperation strategies with safety guarantees. The cooperation between humans and the autonomous agent is modelled as a Priced Timed Markov Decision Process, and decision-making is formulated as a cost-bounded reachability problem. We illustrate the approach using an emergency evacuation scenario. Initial experimental evidence demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach and highlights the trade-offs between optimisation and safety guarantees. FormIDEAble provides a principled foundation for formally assured, socially-aware decision-making in socio-critical systems.

Problem

• autonomous systems
• safety guarantees
• social awareness
• human-robot cooperation
• socio-critical systems

Innovation

• Formal verification
• Socially-aware autonomy
• Priced Timed Markov Decision Process
• Safety guarantees
• Human-agent cooperation