Modeling Unpredictable or Random Environments

Given formal specifications of a system and a desired property of that system, the verification question is "Does this property hold of this system?" My longstanding interest in the specification and verification area has recently turned to autonomous and embedded systems. Typical autonomous systems are unmanned spacecraft and planetary exploration robots. Typical embedded systems are controllers found in aircraft and automobiles, though they are increasingly found in household appliances and consumer electronics. There are some technically challenging formal modeling problems that arise from these kinds of applications because of their operating environments: