Accountability and Agents for Engineering Business Processes
Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Olivier Boissier, Roberto Micalizio, Stefano Tedeschi · Institutional Research Information System University of Turin (University of Turin) · 2019
Business processes realize a business goal by coordinating the tasks undertaken by multiple interacting parties.Even if it is possible to monitor the execution of such complex distributed process, current approaches do not allow participants to report to the right account taker the causes of the success or failure of their duties.However, as in exception management in programming languages, having such information could enable the account taker to properly handle errors.We claim that an explicit representation of accountability and responsibility assumptions provides the right abstractions to engineer multi-agent systems, that execute such business processes, both at the level of design and at the level of programming.Basing our programming approach on multi-agent organizations, we present two accountability patterns for developing accountable agents.To illustrate this approach we use the JaCaMo multi-agent programming platform.2 M. Baldoni et al.In [2] a proposal was made to use accountability and responsibility relationships to state the rights and duties of agents in the organisation, given the specification of a normative structures.From this understanding we define what it means for an agent to be accountable when taking responsibilities in the execution of part of a business process.That is, we address the notion of accountability from a computational perspective and study how it can be obtained as a design property [5].In the following we show how robustness can be achieved via accountability and responsibility relationships, and we use these concepts as tools to systematize and guide the design and development of the agents.We then exemplify how such concepts can be engineered in the particular context of a JaCaMo multi-agent system where agents execute under a normative organization expressing business process as accountability and responsibility relations among agents.However, since processes are independent, one cannot give for granted that another will answer.It follows that when a process does not answer, the waiting one may get stuck indefinitely.