78 3 CHAPTER 3 Design requirements need to refer to the observable behaviour of drone or Autonomous Weapon System and operator, and are considered in the context of pre- and post-flight procedures. They may apply to checkable behaviours of the drone or Autonomous Weapon System (flying over a certain altitude or flying over certain areas), to pre-flight processes (getting approval or checking weather conditions), or to post-flight processes (evaluation of route followed or treatment of the data obtained). Crucially, they are not limited to the drones’ or Autonomous Weapon Systems’ behaviour, but must include the system around it for human oversight: procedures such as pre-flight safety checks, acquiring authorisations or human review of the data obtained should all be mandated and constrained, so that we can guarantee that the entire flight process has been subject to human oversight. The norms and observable requirements identified at this stage form the basis for the next stage, indicating what should be monitored and checked, and which actions constitute norm violations. Observation stage In this stage, the behaviour of the system is evaluated with respect to the values by studying its compliance with the requirements identified in the interpretation stage. As these requirements focus on observable behaviours, in this stage observations are made, and it is reported whether norms are being adhered to or not (and, by extension, whether values are being fulfilled). Observations can be automated (e.g., automatically trigger a flag if the drone or Autonomous Weapon System has deviated from its planned path), or manually performed by an operator, depending on the requirement. A specific trade-off to consider is the observation time versus the reliability of the observations: extensive, lengthy manual or computationally expensive checks may take a long time to perform, delaying operations, but may be the only way to check a certain requirement. Depending on how crucial such a requirement is, observations may be relaxed (e.g., performed at random intervals), or the requirement modified for a better fit. From these observations, we can compute whether norms have been adhered to. Such a computation can be done through a formal representation of the norms and requirements. For example, a formalisation of the Glass Box can be found in Aler Tubella and Dignum (2019), using a “counts-as” operator to relate more concrete norms to their more abstract counterparts. Within that formalisation, by assigning ground truth values to a set of propositional atoms through the observations, we can compute which norms have been adhered to, and escalate up the hierarchy of norms to determine which values have been followed in each context. Alternatively, norms can, for example, be expressed in a deontological language (Wright, 1981) and similarly relate to the observations by representing them as ground truths. A different, complementary approach that we
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