Temporal Models for History-Aware Explainability

Abstract

On one hand, there has been a growing interest towards the application of AI-based learning and evolutionary programming for self-adaptation under uncertainty. On the other hand, self-explanation is one of the self-* properties that has been neglected. This is paradoxical as self-explanation is inevitably needed when using such techniques. In this paper, we argue that a self-adaptive autonomous system (SAS) needs an infrastructure and capabilities to be able to look at its own history to explain and reason why the system has reached its current state. The infrastructure and capabilities need to be built based on the right conceptual models in such a way that the system's history can be stored, queried to be used in the context of the decision-making algorithms.