Accountability and Agents for Engineering Business Processes
Abstract
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 as-
sumptions 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 il-
lustrate this approach we use the JaCaMo multi-agent programming platform.