Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
welfarist control
societal mandate
resource allocation
multi-agent systems
ethical design
Welfarist Control Design -- How to fulfill the societal mandate in multi-agent control?
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenge of effectively translating social preferences into resource allocation objectives within multi-agent control systems to fulfill ethical and socially responsible missions. By aggregating individual preferences into a welfare-oriented control objective, the study unifies this approach across three major control paradigms: online feedback optimization, Markov decision process control, and model predictive control. It presents the first systematic framework that embeds social welfare principles directly into the control design pipeline, integrating preference aggregation with formal verification mechanisms to yield a certifiably compliant control architecture. This framework offers a novel pathway for automated resource allocation systems that simultaneously ensures fairness, efficiency, and interpretability.
📝 Abstract
At the core of most socio-technical systems lies a scarce resource that is allocated among agents: highway lanes, public transit, road space, water rights, energy access, grid capacity, user attention, pollution rights, etc. With further automation of the underlying allocation processes, control engineers are increasingly tasked to make decisive assumptions regarding what society wants. In practice to date, design choices are largely driven by industry norms and conventions rather than a result of conscientiously responsible and ethical design. In this paper, we look at tools available to control engineers to design systems in a more principled manner in order to match the societal mandate. We consider three control design paradigms: online feedback optimization, control of Markov decision processes, and model predictive control. Beginning with aggregating individual agents' preferences into control design objectives, subsequently ensuring and certifying the fulfillment of those specifications, we argue that the feedback nature of control systems enables appropriate allocation of the shared resources in ways hitherto unparalleled.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Welfarist Control
Multi-agent Systems
Resource Allocation
Feedback Optimization
Societal Mandate
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