Using Cultures and Values to Support Flexible Coordination

Abstract

This thesis proposes a method for supporting flexible coordination in multi-agent systems (MASs). In other words, we aim at influencing societies of artificial agents such that they can handle complex and evolving environments and collective goals (emergency rescue robots capable of handling various hazards, climatic conditions, statuses of victims). Towards acheving this goal, we investigated why humans manage to coordinate relatively flexibly in comparison with their artificial counterparts (agents). We discovered that culture is a key factor of this relative success. Briefly, when humans share a cultural background, they share a common idea about what "working together'' means, supporting flexible coordination. Artificial agents miss this aspect, leading to coordination failures. As a goal, we want to better understand how culture can be integrated within and used for coordinating artificial societies. This goal raises this research question: (how) can human-like culture be used for supporting coordination in artificial societies? As a preliminary step, we need to answer that question: (how) can the influence human-like cultures be integrated within artificial societies? In turn, this question raises a third one: how does culture influence coordination in human societies? As a first step, we conceptualize the influence of culture on coordination, based on available theories. From a generic perspective, we explain that culture influences individual decisions, supporting matching expectations and coherent interaction patterns, leading in turn to (generally) better collective performance. More specifically, we specify how the core acknowledged patterns of the influence of culture (cultural importance given to power status, to rules) apply in the context of coordination (culture influences whether leaders are (made) responsible for giving order vs propositions to subordinates). As a second step, we study how to replicate human-like influences of culture on coordination within artificial societies. First, we investigate the core aspects of culture that impact the most (flexible) coordination in human societies. We discover that values, what people consider as "good'' of "important'' (honesty, obedience, autonomy), constitute such an aspect, by deeply supporting a wide range of (interaction-related) decisions. Then, for illustrating how to replicate influence of culture within artificial societies, we build an value-sensitive agent decision architecture capable of making culturally-sensitive coordination-related decisions. Finally, we illustrate that our architecture can replicate the influence of culture on coordination through two simulations that replicate core known coordination-related cultural phenomena. As a third step, we study how human-like values can be used for coordinating artificial societies. We investigate for which coordination problems values can offer an operational means for supporting coordination. We discover that values are particularly adequate for solving problems involving complex and dynamic environments, requiring agents to make coordination-related decisions. Then, towards concretely implementating values, we study the technical details to consider for supporting flexible coordination with values (concretely designing values, integrating them within agents). In sum, this thesis highlights that key aspects of the influence of culture on coordination can be replicated within artificial societies. Furthermore, we show that this influence can be handled for using culture as a means for supporting flexible coordination in artificial societies.