Hazard prevention in mission plans for aerial vehicles based on soft institutions

Hazard prevention in mission plans requires careful analysis and appropriate tools to support the design of preventive and/or corrective measures. It is most challenging in systems with large sets of states and complex state relations. In the case of sociotechnical systems, hazard prevention becomes even more dicult given that the behaviour of human centric components can at best be partially predictable. In the present article we focus on a specic class of sociotechnical systems {namely air spaces containing pilot controlled as well as autonomous aircrafts { and introduce the notion of relevant hazards. We also introduce soft institutions as an appropriate basis for analysis, with the aim of addressing relevant hazards. The concept of soft institutions is drawn from
specification languages for interaction between agents in multi-agent systems but, in our case, is adapted for use in systems that combine human and automated actors.