Developing and testing intelligent agents is a complex task that is both time-consuming and costly. This creates the potential that problems in the agent's behavior will be realized only after the agent has been put to use. As a result, society is left with a vexing problem: although we can create agents that seem capable of performing useful tasks autonomously, we are simultaneously unwilling to trust these agents because of the inherent incompleteness of testing. In this paper we present a framework that brings validation techniques out of the laboratory and uses them to monitor and constrain an agent's behavior concurrent with task execution. Applications of this framework extend well beyond helping to ensure safe agent behavior through run-time validation. They also include the ability to enforce social or environmental policies or to regulate the agent's autonomy.
['Scott A. Wallace']
S-assess: a library for behavioral self-assessment