Enabling Accountable Collaboration in Distributed, Autonomous Systems by Intelligent Agents

High degree of distribution is one of the leading features in present computer systems. Cloud Computing, Internet of Things and Blockchains are nowadays very hot research topics and we are going to use these architectures in many critical domains, like e-health, conservation of documents and acts in accordance with the law, economic transactions and contracts etc. When dealing with such heterogeneous systems, it is really hard to understand if a distributed collaboration among agents fulfils requirements, rules and current laws. In addition, if something goes wrong during collaboration, assigning accountability is even more complicated. This work aims at introducing a novel methodology and a formal framework able to attribute liability of failures or incorrect design and implementation both to humans and software agents in autonomous, distributed systems. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG