Accountable Protocols in Abductive Logic Programming

Finding the entity responsible for an unpleasant situation is often difficult, especially in artificial agent societies. SCIFF is a formalization of agent societies, including a language to describe rules and protocols, and an abductive proof procedure for compliance checking. However, how to identify the entity responsible for a violation is not always clear. In this work, a definition of accountability for artificial societies is formalized in SCIFF. Two tools are provided for the designer of interaction protocols: a guideline, in terms of syntactic features that ensure accountability of the protocol, and an algorithm (implemented in a software tool) to investigate if, for a given protocol, nonaccountability issues could arise.