Amel Bennaceur’s research while affiliated with The Open University and other places

Autonomous systems, such as drones and rescue robots, are increasingly used during emergencies. They deliver services and provide situational awareness that facilitate emergency management and response. To do so, they need to interact and cooperate with humans in their environment. Human behaviour is uncertain and complex, so it can be difficult to reason about it formally. In this paper, we propose IDEA: an adaptive software architecture that enables cooperation between humans and autonomous systems, by leveraging in the social identity approach. This approach establishes that group membership drives human behaviour. Identity and group membership are crucial during emergencies, as they influence cooperation among survivors. IDEA systems infer the social identity of surrounding humans, thereby establishing their group membership. By reasoning about groups, we limit the number of cooperation strategies the system needs to explore. IDEA systems select a strategy from the equilibrium analysis of game-theoretic models, that represent interactions between group members and the IDEA system. We demonstrate our approach using a search-and-rescue scenario, in which an IDEA rescue robot optimises evacuation by collaborating with survivors. Using an empirically validated agent-based model, we show that the deployment of the IDEA system can reduce median evacuation time by $13.6\%$ .

Context and motivation: Organisational values such as inclusion are often explicit, providing a common language to guide behaviour and motivate employees. Personal values are often less explicit but do guide individuals’ decisions, and when challenged they generate an emotional response. However, understanding organisational values and linking them to implicit personal values of employees can be challenging.Question/problem: In this paper, we investigate the use of emotional goal models to act as a link between organisational and personal values.Principal ideas/result: We argue that when designing processes and systems for enacting organisational values, requirements engineers must consider the diverse personal values of the employees. We completed a case study within a multi-national organisation and identified pain points on career journeys which amplify the disparity of experience between men and women. We applied emotional goal modelling to elicit requirements for inclusive processes. We suggest that emotional goals can serve as a proxy for personal values and can support the formulation of requirements for designing processes cognizant of the organisational value of inclusion.Contribution: Our empirical evaluation suggests that the modelling of emotional goals can support the operationalisation of values as requirements for gender-inclusive organisational processes and systems.KeywordsEmotional Goal ModellingInclusive DesignValues