# Computational Accountability in MAS Organizations with ADOPT
## 2 Multiagent Systems Need Accountability
The styles are modeled using the notions of actor, goal and actor dependency, and are intended to capture concepts like needs/wants, delegations and obligations. Finally, the organizational model adopted in JaCaMo [11] decomposes the specification of an organization into three dimensions. The structural dimension specifies roles, groups and links between roles in the organization. The functional dimension is composed of one (or more) scheme(s) that elicits how the global organizational goal(s) is (are) decomposed into subgoals and how these subgoals are grouped in coherent sets, called missions, to be distributed to the agents. Finally, the normative dimension binds the two previous dimensions by specifying the roles' permissions and obligations for missions. Recently, however, such a goal-oriented perspective on organizations has been criticized [13; 27]. The point is that this approach provides a viable solution for modularizing complex tasks in terms of subtasks, each of which is assigned to a specific agent, but it is not a good solution for handling open distributed systems where agents are autonomous. In such scenarios, in fact, agents' goals might be in contrast to each other. Indeed, the organizational goals may not overlap completely with agents' goals. It follows that agents' obedience to the system norms cannot be taken for granted. Agent autonomy demands a different way of conceptualizing software modularity: not in terms of subgoals that are assigned to the agents, but rather in terms of responsibilities that are explicitly taken on by the agents. In [13], the authors see interaction as a central element of their modeling approach, and model interactions in terms of mutual expectations among the agents, bringing the conception of accountability as a way of characterizing the \"good behavior\" of each of the involved agents. Here, accountability is a directed relationship from one agent to another, and reflects the legitimate expectations the second principal has of the first. The resulting approach, dubbed interaction-oriented software engineering (IOSE), focuses on social protocols, which specify how accountability relationships among the concerned principals progress through their interactions. In particular, as the authors themselves state, \"in IOSE, it makes little sense to ask what functionality a role provides [...]; it makes sense though to ask to whom and for what is a role accountable [...]. A social protocol essentially describes how a principal playing a role would be embedded in the social world by way of accountability\". The essential message we want to stress, thus, is that the lack of an explicit treatment of the accountability relationship, within the existing organizational models, makes those models vulnerable. In this paper we have demonstrated this vulnerability in practice in the context of the JaCaMo platform. In particular, we show how the lack of an explicit take-on of responsibilities, for the distributed goals, thwarts goal achievement as well as the overall system capability of answering when some exceptional event occurs. We show, in fact, that when an agent joins an organization by playing a role, it is not aware of all the possible goals it will be asked to achieve as a role player. Thus, an agent can be assigned a goal for which it has no plan. The failure of the goal, though, cannot be attributed to the agent, nor to the organization, in an easy way. In fact, on the agent's side, the lack of a proper plan for the goal does not make the agent responsible. On the organization's side, the organization has no means to know what an agent can actually do, thus, the system cannot be considered as responsible either. In other terms, if an agent does not have the capabilities for achieving a goal, assigning that goal to it, even through an obligation, does not bring any closer the achievement of the goal of interest.