Assured autonomy: How operations research powers and orchestrates generative AI systems

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Dai, Tinglong; Simchi-Levi, David; Wu, Michelle Xiao; Xie, Yao
• 署名单位: Johns Hopkins University; Johns Hopkins University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Purdue University System; Purdue University; University System of Georgia; Georgia Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1177/10591478261455127
• 发表日期: 2026

摘要

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is shifting from conversational assistants toward agentic systems-autonomous decision-making systems that sense, decide, and act within operational workflows. This shift creates an autonomy paradox: as GenAI systems are granted greater operational autonomy, they should, by design, embody more formal structure, more explicit constraints, and stronger tail-risk discipline. We argue that stochastic generative models can be fragile in operational domains unless paired with mechanisms that provide verifiable feasibility, robustness to distribution shift, and stress testing under high-consequence scenarios. To address this challenge, we develop a conceptual framework for assured autonomy grounded in operations research (OR), built on two complementary approaches. First, flow-based generative models frame generation as deterministic transport characterized by an ordinary differential equation, enabling auditability, constraint-aware generation, and connections to optimal transport, robust optimization, and sequential decision control. Second, operational safety is formulated through an adversarial robustness lens: decision rules are evaluated against worst-case perturbations within uncertainty or ambiguity sets, making unmodeled risks part of the design. This framework clarifies how increasing autonomy shifts OR's role from solver to guardrail to system architect, with responsibility for control logic, incentive protocols, monitoring regimes, and safety boundaries. These elements define a research agenda for assured autonomy in safety-critical, reliability-sensitive operational domains.