An Investigation of Regulatory Decision Making by Automated Decision Makers

In this proposal we will investigate if we can simulate regulatory group decision making utilising an environment of cooperating and automated decision makers. This ambitious project comprises a multi-disciplinary, inter-institutional team drawn from Computer Science, Psychology and Industrial and Manufacturing Science. The four investigators will be supported by a three year PhD student, based at Cranfield, and a two year Nottingham based research assistant.The first phase of the project will define the regulatory decision contexts (environmental planning, permitting, policy development), individual roles and personality influences. These factors will be incorporated in the simulation environment in the second phase of the project and the resulting system will be analysed in the final phase.The second phase of the project will take the outputs from phase one and create a simulation environment. This environment will initially be built using agent based technology, but other machine learning approaches will be investigated as appropriate.The final phase will involve all members of the team in analysing the resulting system and calibrating its parameters in order to emulate group decision making processes as closely as possible.A key feature of this proposal are 2-day workshops at nine monthly intervals in order for the whole team (investigators, PhD student, RA and project partners) to work together in a focused way.