View article

Decision-making systems are prone to discrimination against individuals with regard to protected characteristics such as gender and ethnicity. Detecting and explaining the discriminatory behavior of implemented software is difficult. To avoid the possibility of discrimination from the onset of software development, we propose a model-based methodology called MBFair that allows for verifying UML-based software designs with regard to individual fairness. The verification in MBFair is performed by generating temporal logic clauses, whose verification results enable reporting on the individual fairness of the targeted software. We study the applicability of MBFair using three case studies in real-world settings including a bank services system, a delivery system, and a loan system. We empirically evaluate the necessity of MBFair in a user study and compare it against a baseline scenario in which no modeling and tool …