Liability and automation: Issues and challenges for socio-technical systems

Who is responsible for accidents in highly automated systems? How do we apportion liability among the various participants in complex socio-technical organisations? How can different liability regulations at different levels (supranational, national, local) be harmonized? How do we provide for accountability, while promoting safety? These and other questions are being addressed by the ALIAS (Addressing Liability Impact of Automated Systems) project. In this paper we present the outline framework of the project, its objectives, and some preliminary results: in particular, we present a framework for liability in aviation, an analysis of real accidents and of a hypothetical case involving UAS according to a methodology developed in the project, and finally, we introduce the Legal Case, that is a methodological tool (currently under development) aimed at identifying and addressing liability issues of automated ATM systems.