Autonomous traffic agents (ATAs) are expected to act in ways tat are not only safe, but also aligned with stakeholder values across legal, social, and moral dimensions. In this paper, we adopt an established formal model of conflict from epistemic game theory to support the development of such agents. We focus on value conflicts-situations in which agents face competing goals rooted in value-laden situations and show how conflict analysis can inform key phases of the design process. This includes value elicitation, capability specification, explanation, and adaptive system refinement. We elaborate and apply the concept of Value-Aligned Operational Design Domains (VODDs) to structure autonomy in accordance with contextual value priorities. Our approach shifts the emphasis from solving moral dilemmas at runtime to anticipating and structuring value-sensitive behaviour during development.
@article{arxiv.2507.18284,
title = {Designing Value-Aligned Traffic Agents through Conflict Sensitivity},
author = {Astrid Rakow and Joe Collenette and Maike Schwammberger and Marija Slavkovik and Gleifer Vs Alves},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.18284},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Short version of this paper has been accepted at EUMAS 2025 https://euramas.github.io/eumas2025/