Social planning for trusted autonomy

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe social planning mechanisms for constructing and representing explainable plans in human-agent interactions, addressing one aspect of what it will take to meet the requirements of a trusted autonomous system. Social planning is automated planning in which the planning agent maintains and reasons with an explicit model of the other agents, human or artificial, with which it interacts, including the humans’ goals, intentions, and beliefs, as well as their potential behaviours. The chapter includes a brief overview of the challenge of planning in human-agent teams, and an introduction to a recent body of technical work in multi-agent epistemic planning. The benefits of planning in the presence of nested belief reasoning and first-person multi-agent planning are illustrated in two scenarios, hence indicating how social planning could be used for planning human-agent interaction explicitly as part of an agent’s deliberation.