Apprentice: a technique for building operations automation

This paper proposes a technique, Apprentice, for constructing, incrementally and primarily passively, a knowledge base for operations automation. It blends machine learning and knowledge elicitation techniques similar to those recently proposed by the knowledge acquisition community. Apprentice allows operators to understand what an autonomous system is doing and why, and then repair or extend the underlying knowledge base as necessary to meet the wide range of operating conditions that characterize complex systems operations. The four phases of Apprentice's knowledge building technique are presented followed by a brief discussion of the advantages of this approach.