Context Matters: Contextual Value-Based Deliberation in Water Consumption Scenarios

Luis Oliva-Felipe, Inês Lobo, Jack McKinlay, Frank Dignum, Marina De Vos, Ulises Cortés, Atia Cortés

Abstract: Values and context are important in an agent’s decision-making process. Individuals may prioritise values differently, and changing context can also necessitate different considerations. In this paper, we use Schwartz’s theory of basic human values to define ethical values and introduce a preorder to model an agent’s relative preference among those values. We characterise context using this preorder, which can then be used in socio-technical systems as part of the autonomous agents’ deliberation process. We also define the transition between contexts as shifts in value order. To illustrate our approach, we implement this preorder in a domestic water-consumption scenario featuring two towns whose citizens make daily decisions regarding showering, considering visitors, drought rules, and sports activities. Our results demonstrate how our model can effectively represent value orders and integrate them into agents’ decision-making processes. This approach also allows us to characterise contexts, understand how these contexts affect agents’ behaviour, and assess the impact of shifting contexts. We observe that the value order influences the dynamics of context transitions, making some value orders more prone to shift than others.

External IDs:doi:10.1007/978-3-031-85463-7_13