Causality, responsibility and blame in team plans

Alechina, Natasha; Halpern, Joseph Y.; Logan, Brian

Abstract

Many objectives can be achieved (or may be achieved more effectively) only by a group of agents executing a team plan. If a team plan fails, it is often of interest to determine what caused the failure, the degree of responsibility of each agent for the failure, and the degree of blame attached to each agent. We show how team plans can be represented in terms of structural equations, and then apply the definitions of causality introduced by Halpern [11] and degree of responsibility and blame introduced by Chockler and Halpern [3] to determine the agent(s) who caused the failure and what their degree of responsibility/blame is. We also prove new results on the complexity of computing causality and degree of responsibility and blame, showing that they can be determined in polynomial time for many team plans of interest.

Citation

Alechina, N., Halpern, J. Y., & Logan, B. Causality, responsibility and blame in team plans. Presented at 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

• Conference Name: 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
• End Date: May 12, 2017
• Acceptance Date: Jan 25, 2017
• Publication Date: May 8, 2017
• Deposit Date: Apr 5, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: May 8, 2017
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: Causality; responsibility; blame; team plans
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/859555
• Publisher URL: http://www.aamas2017.org/proceedings/pdfs/p1091.pdf
• Contract Date: Apr 5, 2017