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

Values and context are important in an agent’s decision-making pro-
cess. 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 con-
texts affect agents’ behaviour, and assess the impact of shifting contexts. We ob-
serve that the value order influences the dynamics of context transitions, making
some value orders more prone to shift than others.