  This work aims to develop a model checking method to verify the decision
making system of Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) in a long range surveillance
mission. The scenario in this work was captured from a long endurance USV
surveillance mission using C-Enduro, an USV manufactured by ASV Ltd. The
C-Enduro USV may encounter multiple non-deterministic and concurrent problems
including lost communication signals, collision risk and malfunction. The
vehicle is designed to utilise multiple energy sources from solar panel, wind
turbine and diesel generator. The energy state can be affected by the solar
irradiance condition, wind condition, states of the diesel generator, sea
current condition and states of the USV. In this research, the states and the
interactive relations between environmental uncertainties, sensors, USV energy
system, USV and Ground Control Station (GCS) decision making systems are
abstracted and modelled successfully using Kripke models. The desirable
properties to be verified are expressed using temporal logic statement and
finally the safety properties and the long endurance properties are verified
using the model checker MCMAS, a model checker for multi-agent systems. The
verification results are analyzed and show the feasibility of applying model
checking method to retrospect the desirable property of the USV decision making
system. This method could assist researcher to identify potential design error
of decision making system in advance.
