INTEGRATED HUMAN DECISION BEHAVIOR MODELING UNDER AN EXTENDED BELIEF-DESIRE-INTENTION FRAMEWORK

Abstract

Modeling comprehensive human decision behaviors in a unified and extensible framework is quite challenging. In this research, an integrated Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) modeling framework is proposed to represent the human decision behavior, whose submodules (Belief, Desire, Decision-Making, and Emotion modules) are based on a Bayesian belief network (BBN), Decision-Field-Theory (DFT), a probabilistic depth first search (PDFS) technique, and a BBN-reinforcement (Q-Learning) hybrid learning algorithm. A key novelty of the proposed model is its ability to represent various human decision behaviors such as decision-making, decision-planning, and learning in a unified framework.To this end, first, we extend DFT (a widely known psychological model for preference evolution) to cope with dynamic environments. The extended DFT (EDFT) updates the subjective evaluation for the alternatives and the attention weights on the attributes via BBN under the dynamic environment. To illustrate and validate the proposed EDFT, a human-in-the-loop experiment is conducted for a virtual stock market. Second, a new approach to represent learning (a dynamic evolution process of underlying modules) in the human decision behavior is proposed under the context of the BDI framework. Our research focuses on how a human adjusts his perception process (involving BBN) dynamically against his performance (depicted via a confidence index) in predicting the environment as part of his decision-planning. To this end, Q-learning is employed and further developed.To mimic realistic human behaviors, attributes of the BDI framework are reverse-engineered from human-in-the-loop experiments conducted in the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE). The proposed modeling framework is demonstrated for a human's evacuation behaviors in response to a terrorist bomb attack. The constructed simulation has been used to test the impact of several factors (e.g., demographics, number of police officers, information sharing via speakers) on evacuation performance (e.g., average evacuation time, percentage of casualties).In addition, the proposed human decision behavior model is extended for decisions of many stakeholders that form a complex social network in the community-based development of software systems.To the best of our knowledge, the proposed human decision behavior modeling framework is one of the first efforts to represent various human decision behaviors (e.g., decision-making, decision-planning, dynamic learning) in a unified BDI framework.