Understanding and Formalizing Accountability for Cyber-Physical Systems
This work addresses the need for clearer accountability mechanisms in cyber-physical systems, though it is incremental as it formalizes existing concepts rather than introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of varying natural language definitions of accountability in cyber-physical systems by developing a formal model to express accountability properties, demonstrating its usefulness through three interpretations and a case study.
Accountability is the property of a system that enables the uncovering of causes for events and helps understand who or what is responsible for these events. Definitions and interpretations of accountability differ; however, they are typically expressed in natural language that obscures design decisions and the impact on the overall system. This paper presents a formal model to express the accountability properties of cyber-physical systems. To illustrate the usefulness of our approach, we demonstrate how three different interpretations of accountability can be expressed using the proposed model and describe the implementation implications through a case study. This formal model can be used to highlight context specific-elements of accountability mechanisms, define their capabilities, and express different notions of accountability. In addition, it makes design decisions explicit and facilitates discussion, analysis and comparison of different approaches.