The Department of Defense (DoD) has invested significant effort over the past decade considering the role of artificial intelligence and autonomy in national security (e.g., Defense Science Board, 2012, 2016, Deputy Secretary of Defense, 2012, Endsley, 2015, Executive Order No. 13859, 2019, US Department of Defense, 2011, 2019, Zacharias, 2019a). However, these efforts were broadly scoped and only partially touched on how the DoD will certify the safety and performance of these systems. More recent work has done this big-picture thinking for the test and evaluation (T&E) community (e.g., Ahner & Parson, 2016, Haugh, Sparrow, & Tate, 2018, Porter et al., 2018, Sparrow, Tate, Biddle, Kaminski, & Madhavan, 2018, Zacharias, 2019b). In parallel, individual programs have been generating their own working-level solutions for their own particular use-cases and challenges.
The framework proposed in the current work bridges the gap between the big picture policy recommendations already made and individual program needs. It is meant to serve as a roadmap framework that the T&E community can follow in order to provide evidence that artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled and autonomous systems function as intended. At times we echo broad policy recommendations made by others as they will also enable T&E activities. In other places we make more specific recommendations relating to test planning and analysis. In this document, we present part one of our two-part roadmap. We discuss the challenges and possible solutions to assessing system effectiveness. A future part two will deal with test efficiency, simulation, and infrastructure. Due to the scope of this project, even the main body of this document only provides a survey of the challenges and our proposed solutions. However, this roadmap serves as an outline to a future series of technical papers covering these topics in detail for working-level testers and analysts
Suggested Citation
Porter, Daniel, Michael McAnally, Chad Bieber, Heather Wojton, and Rebecca Medlin. Trustworthy Autonomy: A Roadmap to Assurance Part I: System Effectiveness. IDA Document P-10768-NS. Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2020.