Semantics-Enabled System Transparency: User-Centered Explanations in Cyber-Physical Systems

A Cyber Physical System (CPS) helps tackle complex problems in various domains, e.g., smart grids or smart buildings. As the complexity of such systems’ behaviours often reduces user understanding and trust, this research proposal aims to enhance system transparency and user-centered explanations in such CPSs. Despite the increasing adoption of CPS across various domains, existing solutions for explaining system behaviors remain limited in scope and effectiveness. We propose a domain-independent framework, leveraging Semantic Web Technologies (SWT), to tackle this challenge. The framework aims to bridge the gap between system complexity and user comprehension by providing user-centered explanations tailored to different user types, advancing transparency, understanding, and usability in CPS deployments. Furthermore, by extending the application domain of SWT to Explainable Cyber Physical System (ExpCPS), this research contributes to the broader semantic web community. Preliminary results have shown the feasibility of the approach in a small use case, based on the newly developed ExpCPS ontology and a rule-based explanation module to derive causal paths from explicit knowledge. Future work will focus on extending these solutions as well as research on the design and evaluation of user-centered explanations.