Getir Yaman, Sinem, Ribeiro, Pedro orcid.org/0000-0003-4319-4872, Cavalcanti, Ana Lucia Caneca orcid.org/0000-0002-0831-1976 et al. (3 more authors) (2025) Specification, Validation and Verification of Social, Legal, Ethical, Empathetic and Cultural Requirements for Autonomous Agents. Journal of Systems and Software. 112229. ISSN 0164-1212
Abstract
Autonomous agents are increasingly being proposed for use in healthcare, assistive care, education, and other applications governed by complex human-centric norms. To ensure compliance with these norms, the rules they induce need to be unambiguously defined, checked for consistency, and used to verify the agent. In this paper, we introduce a framework for formal specification, validation and verification of social, legal, ethical, empathetic and cultural (SLEEC) rules for autonomous agents. Our framework comprises: (i) a language for specifying SLEEC rules and rule defeaters (that is, circumstances in which a rule does not apply or an alternative form of the rule is required); (ii) a formal semantics (defined in the process algebra tock-CSP) for the language; and (iii) methods for detecting conflicts and redundancy within a set of rules, and for verifying the compliance of an autonomous agent with such rules. We show the applicability of our framework for two autonomous agents from different domains: a firefighter UAV, and an assistive-dressing robot.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Authors. |
Keywords: | autonomous agents; social, legal, ethical, empathethic and cultural requirements; verification and validation; sociotechnical systems; formal methods |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Sciences (York) > Computer Science (York) The University of York > Faculty of Social Sciences (York) > The York Law School |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 25 Sep 2024 11:40 |
Last Modified: | 02 Apr 2025 23:28 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112229 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.jss.2024.112229 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:217577 |
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Description: Specification, validation and verification of social, legal, ethical, empathetic and cultural requirements for autonomous agents
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