Explainable Agents as Static Web Pages: UAV Simulation Example

Mualla, Yazan; Kampik, Timotheus; Tchappi, Igor H.; Najjar, Amro; Galland, Stéphane; Nicolle, Christophe

Motivated by the apparent societal need to design complex autonomous systems whose decisions and actions are humanly intelligible, the study of explainable artificial intelligence, and with it, research on explainable autonomous agents has gained increased attention from the research community. One important objective of research on explainable agents is the evaluation of explanation approaches in human-computer interaction studies. In this demonstration paper, we present a way to facilitate such studies by implementing explainable agents and multi-agent systems that i) can be deployed as static files, not requiring the execution of server-side code, which minimizes administration and operation overhead, and ii) can be embedded into web front ends and other JavaScript-enabled user interfaces, hence increasing the ability to reach a broad range of users. We then demonstrate the approach with the help of an application that was designed to assess the effect of different explainability approaches on the human intelligibility of an unmanned aerial vehicle simulation.