Accountability, Responsibility and Robustness in Agent Organizations

Agent organizations are widely used for the design and development of distributed systems. Agent organizations, however, lack of a systematic way to treat exceptions. In this paper we introduce ARFIN organizations as a novel way to conceptualize multiagent systems. We characterize ARFIN organizations in terms of accountability and responsibility notions that complement the normative system of a standard organization. ARFIN improves the robustness of the resulting system since it enables a systematic treatment of exceptions by detecting and reporting them to the agent with the right capabilities for handling them.