Behavioural profiling in cyber-social systems

Abstract

Computer systems have evolved from standalone systems, over networked systems, to cyber-physical systems. In all stages, human operators have been essential for the functioning of the system and for understanding system messages. Recent trends make human actors an even more central part of computer systems, resulting in what we call “cyber-social systems”. In cyber-social systems, human actors and their interaction with a system are essential for the state of the system and its functioning. Both the system’s operation and the human’s operating it are based on an assumption of each other’s behaviour. Consequently, an assessment of the state of a system must take the human actors and these interactions into account. However, human behaviour is difficult to model at best. While socio-technical system models promise the inclusion of human actors into a basis for system assessment, they lack the modelling mechanisms for human behaviour. Existing behavioural models, on the other side, mostly aim at explaining actions after an event. In this paper we discuss, how behavioural models can be used to profile actor behaviour either online or in simulations to understand the potential motivation and to test hypotheses.