Ensuring trustworthy and ethical behaviour in intelligent logical agents

Abstract

Autonomous Intelligent Agents are employed in many applications upon which the life and welfare of living beings and vital social functions may depend. Therefore, agents should be trustworthy. A priori certification techniques (i.e., techniques applied prior to system's deployment) can be useful, but are not sufficient for agents that evolve, and thus modify their epistemic and belief state, and for open Multi-Agent Systems, where heterogeneous agents can join or leave the system at any stage of its operation. In this paper, we propose/refine/extend dynamic (runtime) logic-based self-checking techniques, devised in order to be able to ensure agents' trustworthy and ethical behaviour.