Extending Causal Models from Machines into Humans

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to extend causal models from machines to include human behavior, enabling comprehensive reasoning about socio-technical systems like automated vehicles.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to merge machine and human causal models, enhancing analysis of complex socio-technical interactions.

Findings

Successfully merged machine and human causal models

Demonstrated approach with a highly automated vehicle example

Enabled reasoning about human and machine actions together

Abstract

Causal Models are increasingly suggested as a means to reason about the behavior of cyber-physical systems in socio-technical contexts. They allow us to analyze courses of events and reason about possible alternatives. Until now, however, such reasoning is confined to the technical domain and limited to single systems or at most groups of systems. The humans that are an integral part of any such socio-technical system are usually ignored or dealt with by "expert judgment". We show how a technical causal model can be extended with models of human behavior to cover the complexity and interplay between humans and technical systems. This integrated socio-technical causal model can then be used to reason not only about actions and decisions taken by the machine, but also about those taken by humans interacting with the system. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of merging causal models about machines with causal models about humans and illustrate the usefulness of this approach with a highly automated vehicle example.