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Accountability as a Foundation for Requirements in Sociotechnical Systems

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/11/2021
<mark>Journal</mark>IEEE Internet Computing
Issue number6
Volume25
Number of pages9
Pages (from-to)33-41
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date24/08/21
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

We understand sociotechnical systems (STSs) as uniting social and technical tiers to provide abstractions for capturing how autonomous principals interact with each other. Accountability is a foundational concept in STSs and an essential component of achieving ethical outcomes. In simple terms, accountability involves identifying who can call whom to account and who must provide an accounting of what and when. Although accountability is essential in any application involving autonomous parties, established methods do not support it. We formulate an accountability requirement as one where one principal is accountable to another regarding some conditional expectation. Our metamodel for STSs captures accountability requirements as relational constructs inspired from legal concepts, such as commitments, authorization, and prohibition. We apply our metamodel to a healthcare process and show how it helps address the problems of ineffective interaction identified in the original case study.

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©2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.