Different Forms of Responsibility in Multiagent Systems: Sociotechnical Characteristics and Requirements

Ensuring trustworthy performance of autonomous agents and multiagent systems (MAS) requires computational methods and formal tools to support reasoning about different forms of responsibility. In particular, such tools are needed to support identifying agents or agent groups that are responsible, blameworthy, accountable, or sanctionable for outcomes of collective decisions, for fulfilling tasks, or for adhering to norms and social values. As a step toward developing computational frameworks to represent, reason about, and distinguish these forms of responsibility in MAS, for the first time, we present sociotechnical characteristics of these notions of responsibility, identify their requirements, and discuss their applicability for coordinating MAS and ensuring their trustworthiness. This is a step toward establishing a research agenda on how computational techniques for reasoning about and distinguishing different forms of responsibility contribute to the transformation toward ethical and trustworthy autonomous systems.