Title
IMMENS: Integrated Multi-Manager Environment for Naval Ships
Author
Barnhoorn, J.S.
Rakhorst-Oudendijk, M.
Veltman, K.
Holleman, B.
Haije, T.
Wolbers, J.
Janssen, J.
Publication year
2022
Abstract
The Royal Netherlands Navy is moving towards more autonomous ships to cope with the increasingly complex naval operations while sailing with a reduced manning. The strong expansion of automation and autonomous systems on board requires new solutions for optimal collaboration between the crew and the extensive set of ship systems. We are developing a concept for an Integrated Multi-Manager Environment for Naval Ships: IMMENS. IMMENS aims to be an intelligent ship system that supports the crews of future ship classes, while enabling these crews to exercise and maintain meaningful human control. The ship’s subsystems are integrated in a multi-agent system that formulates and proposes plans to the command team based on an internal representation of the ship’s goals and the current situation. These plans consist of actions that are to be executed in order to achieve the mission goals. The system’s computational design, combined with specific human-machine teaming functionality facilitates the crew and IMMENS to work as a joint cognitive system. This paper shortly introduces IMMENS but reports mainly on the development and application of human-machine teaming concepts that support cooperation between the crew and IMMENS. The first concept offers interaction based on a human-machine language using Goals, Tasks, Constraints and Resources as shared knowledge elements. Since both human and machine understand these elements, human comprehension of the machine's inner workings is supported. The second concept provides the explication of relationships between goals, tasks, constraints, resources and/or external world as a means of intuitively explaining the machine's reasoning by providing transparency regarding, for instance, to which goals certain tasks contribute. Thirdly, we applied and extended on the concept of play-based delegation. A play is a plan-template that allows a user to quickly delegate a complex task to the systems, without the need to drill down, while leaving room for system intelligence to fill in the details.
Subject
Human-machine teaming
Explainable AI
Autonomous
systems
Utility-based reasing
Multi-agent system
Transparency
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:65c007c0-6fe4-4a58-9236-e84a42ba821c
TNO identifier
980126
Source
16th International Naval Engineering Conference and Exhibition (INEC) Adapting and innovating to build resilience for naval operations, International Ship Control Systems Symposium (iSCSS) 8-10 November,2022, Delft
Document type
conference paper