Explainable Software for Cyber-Physical Systems (ES4CPS): Report from the GI Dagstuhl Seminar 19023, January 06-11 2019, Schloss Dagstuhl

TL;DR

This paper reports on a seminar focused on advancing explainability in cyber-physical systems through interdisciplinary research, aiming to improve stakeholder understanding of system behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a coordinated research agenda and community-building efforts for explainable software in cyber-physical systems.

Findings

Identified the need for interdisciplinary approaches

Proposed a research agenda for ES4CPS

Facilitated community building among researchers

Abstract

This report documents the program and results of the GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 19023 on Explainable Software for Cyber-Physical Systems (ES4CPS). The seminar was concerned with the challenge that for future Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), it will become increasingly relevant to explain their behavior (past, current, and future behavior, why a certain action was taken, how a certain goal can be achieved, etc.) to users, engineers, and other stakeholders. In order to increase the explainability of CPS and their engineering tools, fundamental, interdisciplinary research is required; solutions from multiple disciplines within software engineering, systems engineering, and related fields have to be applied, combined, and researched further. The goal of this seminar was to serve as a starting point for an interdisciplinary coordination of research activities targeting ES4CPS and an incubator of a new research community around this topic.