Verifiable Autonomous Systems : Using Rational Agents to Provide Assurance about Decisions Made by Machines

This book is aimed at professionals, researchers and postgraduate students interested in techniques for assuring the behaviour of autonomous systems and how these systems may be programmed so that such assurance can be given. Several case studies are included, along with tutorials for the technologies used in those case studies.

How can we provide guarantees of behaviours for autonomous systems such as driverless cars? This tutorial text, for professionals, researchers and graduate students, explains how autonomous systems, from intelligent robots to driverless cars, can be programmed in ways that make them amenable to formal verification. The authors review specific definitions, applications and the unique future potential of autonomous systems, along with their impact on safer decisions and ethical behaviour. Topics discussed include the use of rational cognitive agent programming from the Beliefs-Desires-Intentions paradigm to control autonomous systems and the role model-checking in verifying the properties of this decision-making component. Several case studies concerning both the verification of autonomous systems and extensions to the framework beyond the model-checking of agent decision-makers are included, along with complete tutorials for the use of the freely-available verifiable cognitive agent toolkit Gwendolen, written in Java.