Accountability and Agents for Engineering Business Processes

International audienceBusiness processes realize a business goal by coordinating the tasksundertaken by multiple interacting parties. Even if it is possible to monitor theexecution of such complex distributed process, current approaches do not allowparticipants to report to the right account taker the causes of the success or failureof 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, thatexecute such business processes, both at the level of design and at the level ofprogramming. 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