# Computational Accountability in MAS Organizations with ADOPT
## 7 Conclusions  
Accountability is an important asset in human societies. In this paper we have shown how accountability plays a central role also in MAS engineering. Specifically, we have argued that while MASs rely on the metaphor of (human) organizations as a way for distributing goals and for establishing norms of good behavior, the organizational models in the state of the art are inadequate for developing robust open systems. In open systems, the agents see an organization as a means for reaching their own goals, which may not coincide with the organizational ones. Thus, when an organization assigns a goal to an agent, that organization cannot hold the expectation that the agent will pursue that goal. This poses a question about the robustness of an open MAS, which can only be obtained by relying on the commitments that each agent voluntarily takes towards the organization as a whole. This is the rationale that has driven us in proposing the ADOPT protocol, whose objective is to make agents, and the organization to which they belong, mutually accountable.  
We plan to continue this study along two main research directions. The first concerns the specification of a conceptual model of accountability for use in MASs. We believe the notions of expectation and of control to be at the heart of accountability, and find a challenge in capturing the relational nature of this concept. Among the repercussions of such a model lies the possibility to provide organizations with a tool that will enable them to evaluate, and possibly improve, the processes put in place, as well as the whole organizational structure. The second is to account in the model, and also in the protocol, for a notion of negative accountability. This means not only accounting for what agents should have achieved and have not, but also for active interferences, by which agents may impede social progress. In addition, the ADOPT protocol presented in this paper could be complemented with some reasoning mechanism on the forum side. ADOPT, in fact, aims at tracing, during the interaction, the relevant information for the computation of accountability, but it does not address how to use such information to identify who is accountable. Indeed, this is the task of the forum [38]. A possible way to support the forum, thus, could be represented by the Delphi protocol, whose first formalization in terms of a MAS organization is given in [68] by means of the INGENIAS [69] methodology. In the Delphi protocol, a client submits to a group of experts a question, and one, or more, monitor agents set up an iterative interaction among the experts until a consensus  
Figure 5: Types of self-regulatory initiatives within individual civil– social organizations [24].  
is reached about the answer to the question. A similar mechanisms for consensus reaching can be adopted for automating, at least in part, the task of the forum.  
The source code of the AccountabilityBoard artifact and of the examples presented in Section 5 is available at [[http://di.unito.it/adopjacamo](http://di.unito.it/adopjacamo)]([http://di.unito.it/adopjacamo](http://di.unito.it/adopjacamo)).  
This work was partially supported by the _Accountable Trustworthy Organizations and Systems (ATHOS)_ project, funded by Universita degli Studi di Torino and Compagnia di San Paolo (CSP 2014).  
All authors equally contributed to this research.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.  
The following abbreviations are used in this manuscript:  
\begin{tabular}{l l} CNP & Contract Net Protocol \\ CTL & Computation tree logic \\ CTLC & Computation tree logic with commitment modality \\ CTLK & Computation tree logic with epistemic modality \\ FIPA & Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents \\ IOSE & Interaction-oriented software engineering \\ MAS & Multiagent system \\ STS & Socio-technical system \\ \end{tabular}