Self-Explaining Digital Systems - Some Technical Steps

Today's increasingly complex adaptable and autonomous systems are hard to design and difficult to use. Partly this is due to problems in understanding why a system executes certain actions. We propose to extend digital systems such that they can explain their actions to users and designers. We formalize this as self-explanation and show how to implement and verify a self-explaining system. A robot controller serves as proof-of-concept for self-explanation.