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International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems

EMAS 2019: Engineering Multi-Agent Systems pp 3–24Cite as

Accountability and Responsibility in Multiagent Organizations for Engineering Business Processes

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12058))

Abstract

Business processes realize a business goal by coordinating the tasks undertaken by multiple interacting parties. Given such a distributed nature, Multiagent Organizations (MAO) are a promising paradigm for conceptualizing and implementing business processes. Yet, MAO still lack of a systematic method for reporting to the right agents feedback about success or failure of a task. We claim that an explicit representation of accountability and responsibility assumptions provides the right abstractions to engineer MAO for supporting the execution of business processes. Basing our programming approach on MAO, we present two accountability patterns for developing accountable agents. To illustrate this approach we use the JaCaMo multi-agent programming platform.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Here, we restrict our attention to processes that do not include loops; otherwise it would not be possible to express them as decomposition trees.

  2. 2.

    Event \({\textit{problem-management}}\) corresponds to the achievement of \( root\_key\_ac \)-\( count\_management \), the root goal of the social scheme in Fig. 2.

  3. 3.

    It’s worth noting that we do not define any accountability relationship w.r.t. \({\textit{can-handle}}\), \({\textit{cannot-handle}}\), \({\textit{answer-from-fls}}\) and \({\textit{1-day}}\). Such goals are the ones whom the manager is in charge of and would encompass the manager both as a-giver and a-taker.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Torino, Turin, Italy

    Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Roberto Micalizio & Stefano Tedeschi

  2. Laboratoire Hubert Curien UMR CNRS 5516, Institut Henri Fayol, MINES Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France

    Olivier Boissier

Authors
  1. Matteo Baldoni
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  2. Cristina Baroglio
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  3. Olivier Boissier
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  4. Roberto Micalizio
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  5. Stefano Tedeschi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristina Baroglio .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Louise A. Dennis

  2. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Rafael H. Bordini

  3. University of York, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Yves Lespérance

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Baldoni, M., Baroglio, C., Boissier, O., Micalizio, R., Tedeschi, S. (2020). Accountability and Responsibility in Multiagent Organizations for Engineering Business Processes. In: Dennis, L., Bordini, R., Lespérance, Y. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12058. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51417-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51417-4_1

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