Making Hybrid Plans More Clear to Human Users - A Formal Approach for Generating Sound Explanations

Human users who execute an automatically generated plan want to understand the rationale behind it. Knowledge-rich plans are particularly suitable for this purpose, because they provide the means to give reason for causal, temporal, and hierarchical relationships between actions. Based on this information, focused arguments can be generated that constitute explanations on an appropriate level of abstraction. In this paper, we present a formal approach to plan explanation. Information about plans is represented as first-order logic formulae and explanations are constructed as proofs in the resulting axiomatic system. With that, plan explanations are provably correct w.r.t. the planning system that produced the plan. A prototype plan explanation system implements our approach and first experiments give evidence that finding plan explanations is feasible in real-time

Companion-Technology: Towards User- and Situation-Adaptive Functionality of Technical Systems

Abstract—The properties of multimodality, individuality, adaptability, availability, cooperativeness and trustworthiness are at the focus of the investigation of Companion Systems. In this article, we describe the involved key components of such a system and the way they interact with each other. Along with the article comes a video, in which we demonstrate a fully functional prototypical implementation and explain the involved scientific contributions in a simplified manner. The realized technology considers the entire situation of the user and the environment in current and past states. The gained knowledge reflects the context of use and serves as basis for decision-making in the presented adaptive system