=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2249/paper5
|storemode=property
|title=Computational Accountability and Responsibility in the MAS Domain
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2249/AIIA-DC2018_paper_5.pdf
|volume=Vol-2249
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/aiia/000118
}}
==Computational Accountability and Responsibility in the MAS Domain==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2249/AIIA-DC2018_paper_5.pdf
Computational Accountability and
Responsibility in the MAS Domain
Stefano Tedeschi
Università degli Studi di Torino - Dipartimento di Informatica, Torino, Italy
stefano.tedeschi@unito.it
Abstract. The aim of my PhD is to investigate the notions of compu-
tational accountability and responsibility in multiagent systems, and in
particular in multiagent organizations. The main objective is to develop
both a conceptual framework and a programming platform providing an
explicit representation of the two concepts and allowing their usage to
simplify the design and development of such systems.
Advisor: Matteo Baldoni
Keywords: Accountability · Responsibility · Multiagent Systems.
1 Introduction
Multiagent Systems (MAS) provide useful abstractions for the development of
complex (distributed) systems characterized by multiple individuals that exe-
cute, interact and coordinate with each other to achieve individual or collective
goals. In these kinds of systems software components are represented as goal-
oriented autonomous agents, which act in a shared and possibly distributed en-
vironment and need to coordinate between each other. Organizations represent
strategies to decompose complex goals into simpler sub-goals and to allocate
them to roles which are then played by agents. Furthermore, norms allow to
enrich this structure with a notion of social expectation. However, in open sys-
tems, each autonomous agent has its own goals and capabilities to accommodate
in the global organizational picture. This result can be achieved by establish-
ing explicit relationships, directed from one agent to another, that reflect the
legitimate expectations the second principal has of the first. Such relationships
can be then used as a basis (i) to effectively decompose the organizational goals
and assign tasks to agents and (ii) to determine who should answer when an
unexpected outcome is detected.
On this foundation, wishing to voice my own contribution, the aim of my
PhD is to investigate the notions of computational accountability (see [1]) and
responsibility as tools to represent and model social relationships in multiagent
systems, and especially in multiagent organizations. The overall objective is to
develop both a conceptual framework and a programming platform to simplify
the design and the development of accountability and responsibility supporting
MAS organizations.
2 S. Tedeschi
2 Motivations and context
To face the inherent need of coordination among agents, the organizational
metaphor [11] has been used for a long time in MAS to define a structure of
roles and relations through which tasks are distributed among agents. A sec-
ond generation of organization models (see, e.g., [12, 14]) introduced norms in
the structure of roles and tasks, enriching it with the notion of social expecta-
tions. However, while addressing the requirement of assigning duties and rights
to agents, agent organizations have been criticized (see e.g., [8, 10]) because they
obfuscate accountability. As an illustration let’s consider a simple organization
that generates obligations to perform the actions necessary to build a house to
some participating agents. If the goal of building a wall were wrongly assigned to
a painter agent, would it be licit to sanction him/her for not having fulfilled the
obligation? Maybe the agent is not even capable of building walls, or this is not
in agreement with his/her own internal goals. Agent autonomy, indeed, demands
a different way of conceptualizing coordination in terms of responsibilities that
are explicitly taken on by them, and by establishing directed accountability rela-
tionships, from one agent to another, that reflect the legitimate expectations the
second principal has of the first, and that are grounded in the notion of control
the first agent has over a situation.
In general, one might see accountability as the assumption of responsibility
for decisions and actions that a principal has towards another party. Different
research communities have dealt with the topic of accountability in software
systems. More specifically, in the MAS community, Chopra and Singh see ac-
countability as an explicitly established context-specific relationship between
two parties [9]. Burgermeestre and Hulstijin, in turn, focus on the entire process
of accountability determination [7]. Nevertheless, a complete model of account-
ability and of how accountability relationships are created and evolve is still
missing. Concerning responsibility, [13] sees it as a unique charge assigned to an
agent. Accountability, in turn, specifies the proper way to discharge the given
responsbility. This view is compatible with the triangle model of responsibility
[16] according to which the term bears two main understandings: one amounting
to causation, the other to answerability. In this view, accountability is a pyra-
mid, that comes into being when an accredited public observes a responsibility
triangle. However, none of the currently proposed approaches provide a precise
information model that links the concepts to how the environment evolves.
3 Contribution
The aim of my PhD will be to characterize the notions of accountability and
responsibility in software systems, especially in multiagent organizations. By
these terms I mean the realization via software of the abilities to trace, evaluate,
and communicate accountability and responsibility. In particular, the problem
will be addressed (i) by supplying a formal model and definition of computational
accountability, clarifying its relation with the sibling notion of responsibility,
Computational Accountability and Responsibility in the MAS Domain 3
and (ii) by providing both modeling and computational tools which simplify the
realization of accountability and responsibility supporting agent organizations.
The purpose is to come up with a formalization of the two concepts as first-
class entities which can be used both by the designer to describe the expected
behavior of the system and by the actual agents to direct their own conduct.
The first part of my project is, and will be, focused on the development of a
methodology and framework for the design and development such organizations.
The construction of a comprehensive system requires many different elements:
a formal model of accountability and responsibility, an engine able to properly
distribute responsibilities, an automated forum able to discern the accountability
of all the involved agents, and a mechanism that keeps track of who could be
accountable for what and in which situation. The second part of the project will
be devoted to the development of an actual programming platform implementing
the previously mentioned framework. The idea is to develop a library to be used
to integrate accountability and responsibility support in some of the most widely
used frameworks for programming MAS organizations. One platform that seems
particularly promising is JaCaMo [6], a conceptual model and platform built on
the top of three existing platforms, namely Jason, CArtAgO, and Moise. The
choice of JaCaMo is due to the fact that it provides a very good integration of
the concepts which carachterize agents, environments and organizations, both
from a conceptual and from a computational point of view.
4 Preliminary results
The project has found a first realization in the ADOPT (Accountability-Driven
Organization Programming Technique) protocol for creating and manipulating
accountability relationships. Technically, the core of the proposal builds upon the
notion of role and the action of role adoption, on one side, and on the concept of
social commitment [18], on the other side. An early version of ADOPT has been
presented in [3, 2]. The main intuition is that, when an agent wants to play a role
in an organization, it has to explicitly accept all the accountability requirements
associated with the role itself, expressed as social commitments. The protocol
specifies the shapes of these commitments and controls their creation. ADOPT
has been, then, refined in [4] by clearly separating the role adoption phase from
the goal agreement phase. Moreover, as a case study, an extension of the JaCaMo
framework that implements the protocol has been developed.
At the same time, in [5], an information model that describes which data
should be available, together with their relationships, in order to identify ac-
countabilities in a group of interacting parties has been proposed. The model
refines the characterization of accountability traced with ADOPT, by identifying
the main concepts that come into play in the process of accountability determi-
nation, such as mutually held expectation and control. The model is provided in
Object-Role Modeling1 (ORM) due to the relational nature of the represented
concepts.
1
http://www.orm.net/pdf/ORMwhitePaper.pdf
4 S. Tedeschi
5 Evaluation plan
The conceptual model and platform described above will be evaluated in two
ways, as follows. Regarding the formal model of accountability and responsibility,
the proposal will be compared to the main approaches to accountability from
other areas, such as social sciences, economics, public administration, psychology,
and so on. Accountability is considered a central concept in many fields that
study human interaction and the very same abstractions used in these fields
could be effective in the context of intelligent systems. Accountability is rather
a complex concept, with many different declinations; the aim is to propose a
characterization of it able to capture as many of them as possible. Moreover, the
proposal will be compared with other widely accepted models of coordination,
such as the ones based on norms and the ones based on social commitments.
For what concerns the programming platform, the plan is to evaluate it in-
side the JaCaMo framework. I plan to use the platform to model real-world
scenarios in order to show the benefits coming from an explicit representation
of accountability and responsibility in both the design and execution phases of
the systems. A particularly promising source of practical use cases is the busi-
ness processes area. Actually, multiagent organizations can be effectively used
to represent complex business processes with several interacting components.
Concretely, the plan is to show how an explicit representation of accountabil-
ity and responsibility relationships, with a well-defined semantics, can simplify
both design execution, by addressing some weaknesses that emerge in scenarios
which proved to be particularly challenging to model. One emblematic case is
the one-to-many pattern of interaction as proposed by Silver [17], in the Hiring
Process scenario.
6 Conclusions and future work
Agents in a social state can influence the environment and the agents around
them. Moreover, in open systems, agents in an organization consider it as a
means for reaching their own goals. These goals, however, may not coincide with
the organizational ones. The explicit representation of the relationships created
between the agents and between agents and organizational goals can strongly
increase the robustness of such systems (i) by supporting the decomposition and
distribution of the organizational goal(s) and (ii) by providing a mechanism to
find who should answer in a given situation of interest. My aim, with my PhD
project, is to model these social relationships relying on the notions of account-
ability and responsibility and use them to simplify the design and development
of the resulting systems.
Future work includes, but is not limited to, a further refinement of the for-
malization of accountability and responsibility relationships for computational
use. This includes, for instance, the integration of the model in the well-known
organizational specification of the Moise [15] language. A big effort will be then
devoted to the realization of the actual programming platform for computational
accountability and responsibility support in MAS organizations.
Computational Accountability and Responsibility in the MAS Domain 5
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