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Self-explaining Digital Systems: Technical View, Implementation Aspects, and Completeness

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Advanced Boolean Techniques

Abstract

Today’s systems are increasingly complex, often adaptable, and even autonomous. This makes designing, connecting, diagnosing, and using such systems difficult. Often this difficulty is due to a lack in understanding why a system acts as it does, i.e., why the system executes certain actions.

We propose to extend systems such that they can explain their actions to users and designers. We formalize this as self-explanation. For digital systems we discuss an approach for implementing and verifying our notion of self-explanation. A self-explaining robot controller serves as proof-of-concept.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An extension of our formalism could consider more complex actions that include a certain series of assignments over time, e.g., to first send an address and afterwards data over a communication channel. However, for simplicity we assume here that an appropriate abstraction layer is available. Nonetheless, multiple valuations of the variables may be associated to the same action, e.g., the action “moving towards front left” may abstract from the radius of the curve followed by a system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany

    Görschwin Fey

  2. University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Rolf Drechsler

  3. DFKI Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Rolf Drechsler

Authors
  1. Görschwin Fey
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  2. Rolf Drechsler
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Correspondence to Görschwin Fey .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Arbeitsgruppe Rechnerarchitektur, Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Rolf Drechsler

  2. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Mathias Soeken

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Fey, G., Drechsler, R. (2020). Self-explaining Digital Systems: Technical View, Implementation Aspects, and Completeness. In: Drechsler, R., Soeken, M. (eds) Advanced Boolean Techniques. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20323-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20323-8_1

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