the process engineering area, the AI and the employ-
ees must work together. Teamwork involves user trust
in the model, and, as Volvo’s experiences show, the
AI must explain its predictions to work with humans
productively. This model will have to work with each
identified user archetype and thus be able to help in
material processing, process design, and data mining.
3.2 Identifying User Archetypes
Requirements
Explanations must tailor to the recipient’s knowledge
and working environment; thus, we must identify
our user demographic and their (explanation) require-
ments. Through numerous talks with our business
partners, we identified three relevant user archetypes
- the Machine Operator, Field Expert, and AI Expert -
and their UI and explanation requirements. The Ma-
chine Operator only needs to identify obvious blun-
ders in the AI model related to one process step, but
has a little time to do so. The Field Expert is knowl-
edgeable and needs to verify the AI model’s knowl-
edge and identify blunders, mistakes, and inaccura-
cies in the model predictions. Finally, the AI ex-
pert must identify reasons for wrong model predic-
tions, in order to fix it. These three user archetypes
are common in most AI-augmented process engineer-
ing/optimization use cases, even ones different from
those in this scope. Talks with our business partners
support this fact. In general, the AI expert creates
the model, the field expert verifies the model’s out-
put, and an operator will only want to use the model
that can be trusted. Thus, our planned framework is
helpful in the general scope of process engineering.
3.3 Decision Trees
Decision Trees (DTs) are rule-based white-box mod-
els. Once induced, it is possible for humans to fol-
low a prediction on reasonably sized trees. DTs group
data by creating discrimination criteria (nodes) to ex-
tract and label the structure of the data (Dasgupta
et al., 2020). These criteria are attribute thresholds.
If an input attribute falls within a specific range, the
prediction “goes” in a particular direction down the
tree. The prediction branch consists of the traversed
nodes and the final leaf. This leaf is the prediction.
We intend to use DTs as model-agnostic surrogate
models (metamodels) of an accuracy-focused (black-
box) AI model. The AI model becomes an oracle to
create training data for the DT-inducing process. This
way, we extract what the AI model learned, including
the structures leading to erroneous predictions, which
are helpful for model debugging (Vilone et al., 2020).
Shorter trees use fewer attributes, thus only em-
ploying essential ones and sacrificing accuracy. On
the other hand, the longer the tree is, the more accu-
rate and specific it will be, as branches can accom-
modate more discrimination points (nodes). Since
DTs can be parametrizable, we propose that they can
be used to imitate proper explanations. Selection
of the tree depth for the DT-inducing process offers
the choice between generating accurate but complex
(deep DT) or approximate but simple (shallow DT)
explanations. Further, selection of the truly informa-
tive nodes provides an opportunity for personaliza-
tion, as overwhelming a user with obvious or irrele-
vant facts would be counterproductive.
We note that explanations are contrastive. Any
branch different from DTs’s prediction branch can be
considered a contrastive branch. Thus, these are the
“what if” branches we can use to provide contrastive
elements in explanations. Next, branches can mimic
attribution theory because the nodes in the prediction
branches are akin to chain links: prediction branches’
nodes depend on each other - a node depends on the
previous node. Furthermore, the location of a node in
the prediction branch mimics a temporal value. Nodes
at the start of the prediction branch are “farther” pre-
conditions than nodes closer to the prediction leaf.
3.3.1 Main UI
In our problem context, all three user archetypes use
the same base UI. As seen in Figure 1, we identified
three main areas: left, top, and bottom. The left area
allows the user to select the process step they want
to work in and the materials they want to process.
The user can then select and group the available ma-
terials to process them - which have been automati-
cally colour-coded by an (out-of-scope) clustering al-
gorithm to identify similar materials helpfully.
The top area has two elements: a Parallel Coor-
dinates visualization and an area containing the De-
sign Document for the current process step. Parallel
Coordinates shows batch materials’ control measure-
ments to help with material selection and grouping.
The Design Document allows the user to obtain the
information they need about the current process step.
The bottom area has three elements: the Mate-
rial Measurements table, the Parameter Settings Vec-
tor (PSV) table (including “Go” buttons), and the AI-
Predicted Output measurement table. The first col-
umn of the PSV-table displays the default parameter
settings used in the current process step. The second
column contains an AI-suggested PSV that considers
the selected materials with their exact measurements.
The user can opt to receive an explanation for this
prediction. The user can also use their custom PSV
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