Accountability in Multi-Agent Organizations: from Conceptual Design to Agent Programming

This work proposes a notion of accountability for multi-agent systems, that supports the development of robust distributed systems. Accountability is grounded on responsibility, and encompasses both a normative dimension, and a structural dimension. For realizing robust distributed systems, conceived as agent systems or organizations, it is necessary to keep a right level of situational awareness, through the introduction of the means for gathering and propagating accounts, upon which actions can be taken. This paper presents a formalization of accountability, including the accountability lifecycle, for the design of robust agent organizations. Particular attention is given to the interplay of accountability and goals, by describing typical patterns in which accountability affects the state of an agent’s goals and vice versa. We illustrate the practical aspects of the proposal by means of JaCaMo (Boissier et al. Sci Comput Program 78(6):747–761, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2011.10.004 ).