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On Admissible Behaviours for Goal-Oriented Decision-Making of Value-Aware Agents

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Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14282))

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Abstract

The emerging field of value awareness engineering claims that software agents and systems should be value-aware, i.e. they should be able to explicitly reason about the value-alignment of their actions. Values are often modelled as preferences over states or actions which are then extended to plans. In this paper, we examine the effect of different groundings of values depending on context and claim that they can be used to prune the space of courses of actions that are aligned with them. We put forward several notions of such value-admissible behaviours and illustrate them in the domain of water distribution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Original definition from Montes and Sierra [9] assumes that the range of all value semantics functions is bounded in \([-1,1]\), so \(f_v(s)\approx \) \(-1,0,+1\) indicates that state s strongly opposes, is neutral or strongly promotes the value v, respectively. This would represent an (unnecessary strict) absolute value promotion metric.

  2. 2.

    Note that the \([-1,1]\)-bounded semantics function used in [9] is defined in terms of the Gini index, i.e., \(f_{eq} = 1 - 2 \cdot GI(s)\). Similarly, the rest of the semantics functions we have enumerated can be bounded to that interval if needed. For this theory, we just consider these functions as quantifiers of value preorders.

  3. 3.

    Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Resolution No. 1693 (2009).

  4. 4.

    SDG 6 of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment.

  5. 5.

    https://www.oecd.org/water/Recomendacion-del-Consejo-sobre-el-agua.pdf.

  6. 6.

    In agriculture (https://www.bancomundial.org/es/topic/water-in-agriculture).

  7. 7.

    Statistics on Water Supply and Sanitation Year 2020, see https://www.ine.es/prensa/essa_2020.pdf.

  8. 8.

    Royal Decree 1/2001, of July 20, approving the Revised Text of the Water Law, Article 60.

  9. 9.

    Royal Decree 3/2023, of January 10, establishing the technical-sanitary criteria for the quality of drinking water, its control, and supply, Article 9.

  10. 10.

    Royal Decree 1/2001, of July 20, approving the Revised Text of the Water Law, Article 14.

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Acknowledgements.

This work has been supported by grant VAE: TED2021-131295B-C33 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by the “European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR”, by grant COSASS: PID2021-123673OB-C32 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, and by the AGROBOTS Project of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos funded by the Community of Madrid, Spain.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CETINIA, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid, 28933, Móstoles, Spain

    Andrés Holgado-Sánchez, Joaquín Arias, Mar Moreno-Rebato & Sascha Ossowski

Authors
  1. Andrés Holgado-Sánchez
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  2. Joaquín Arias
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  3. Mar Moreno-Rebato
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  4. Sascha Ossowski
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Correspondence to Andrés Holgado-Sánchez .

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  1. Télécom Paris, Paris, France

    Vadim Malvone

  2. Universitá degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy

    Aniello Murano

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Holgado-Sánchez, A., Arias, J., Moreno-Rebato, M., Ossowski, S. (2023). On Admissible Behaviours for Goal-Oriented Decision-Making of Value-Aware Agents. In: Malvone, V., Murano, A. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems. EUMAS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14282. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43264-4_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43264-4_27

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