Modelling the structure of social-technical systems as a basis for informingsoftware system design is a difficult compromise.Formal methods struggle tocapture the scale and complexity of the heterogeneous organisations that usetechnical systems.Conversely, informal approaches lack the rigour needed toinform the software design and construction process or enable automatedanalysis.We revisit the concept of responsibility modelling, which models socialtechnical systems as a collection of actors who discharge theirresponsibilities, whilst using and producing resources in theprocess. In this thesis responsibility modelling is formalised as a structured approach forsocio-technical system specification and modelling, withwell-defined semantics and support for automated structure and validityanalysis.We provide structured definitions for entity types and relations, anddefine the semantics of delegation and dependency. A constraint logic isintroduced, providing simple specification of complexinteractions between entities. Additionally, we introduce the ability toexplicitly model uncertainty.To support this formalism, we present a new software toolkit that supportsmodelling and automatic analysis of responsibility models in bothgraphical and textual form.The new methodology is validated by applying it to case studies acrossdifferent problem domains. A study of nuclear power station emergency planningis validated by comparison to a similar study performed with earlier forms ofresponsibility modelling, and a study of the TCAS mid-air collision avoidancesystem is validated by evaluation with domain experts. Additionally, we performan explorative study of responsibility modelling understanding and applicabilitythrough a qualitative study of modellers.
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Formalised responsibility modelling for automated socio-technical systems analysis