Date of Award

Spring 3-27-2026

Access Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Software Engineering

Department

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Committee Chair

Omar Ochoa

Committee Chair Email

ochoao@erau.edu

First Committee Member

Massood Towhidnejad

First Committee Member Email

towhid@erau.edu

Second Committee Member

Alejandro Vargas

Second Committee Member Email

vargasar@erau.edu

College Dean

James W. Gregory

Abstract

Ensuring safety in adaptive flight controls systems is an ongoing challenge in aviation, especially as advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) trend upwards. Reinforcement learning is becoming more common in aerospace applications due to the ability to improve these models through training.  While models such as reinforcement learning enable controllers to learn complex behaviors from interaction with the environment, their unpredictability in novel or disturbed conditions raises severe concerns in safety-critical domains. This research investigates the integration of runtime monitoring, a real-time assurance technique, with reinforcement learning-based flight controllers to ensure safety and reliability during flight. By supervising the system’s behavior during execution and enforcing formalized design constraints, runtime monitoring offers a vital middle ground between adaptability and control assurance. This thesis evaluates how runtime monitoring impacts safety compliance, mission success rate, and computation overhead in simulated flight scenarios consisting of waypoint tracking. By analyzing these results under both nominal and disturbed conditions, this work demonstrates the architectural tradeoffs between autonomous performance and runtime assurance, establishing a framework for the future of safe autonomous flight.

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