Analysis of Meeting Protocols by Formalisation, Simulation and Verification

Organizations depend on regular meetings to carry out their everyday tasks. When carried out successfully, meetings offer a common medium for participants to exchange ideas and make decisions. However, many meetings suffer from unfocused discussions or irrelevant dialogues. To study meetings in detail, we first formalize general properties of meetings and a generic meeting protocol to specify how roles in a meeting should interact to realize these properties. This generic protocol is used as a starting point to study real-life meetings. Next, an example meeting is simulated using the generic meeting protocol. The general properties are formally verified in the simulation trace. Next, these properties are also verified formally against empirical data of a real meeting in the same context. A comparison of the two traces reveals that a real meeting is more robust since when exceptions happen and the rules of the protocol are violated, these exceptions are handled effectively. Given this observation, a more refined protocol is specified that includes exception-handling strategies. Based on this refined protocol a meeting is simulated that closely resembles the real meeting. This protocol is then validated against another set of data from another real meeting. By iteratively adding exception handling rules, the protocol is enhanced to handle a variety of situations successfully. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2006

Operators for Formal Modelling of Organizations

Organizational design is an important topic in the literature on organizations. Usually the design principles are addressed informally in this literature. This paper makes a first attempt to formally introduce design operators to formalize the design steps in the process of designing organizations. These operators help an organization designer create an organization design from scratch as well as offer the possibility to revise existing designs of organizations. The operators offer both top-down refinements and bottom-up grouping options. Importantly, the operators can be combined into complex operators that can serve as patterns for larger steps in an organization design process. The usability of the design operators is demonstrated in a running example. The contribution of this paper provides a solid basis for the development of a software environment supporting interactive organization design processes. This is demonstrated by an implemented prototype example tool

Verifying Interlevel Relations within Organizational Models

In this paper the formal theoretical basis used for transformation of a non-executable external behavioral specification for an organizational model into an executable format, required for enabling verification techniques, is explained in detail

A Framework for Formal Modeling and Analysis of Organizations

A new, formal, role-based, framework for modeling and analyzing both real world and artificial organizations is introduced. It exploits static and dynamic properties of the organizational model and includes the (frequently ignored) environment. The transition is described from a generic framework of an organization to its deployed model and to the actual agent allocation. For verification and validation of the proposed model, a set of dedicated techniques is introduced. Moreover, where most computational models can handle only two or three layered organizational structures, our framework can handle any arbitrary number of organizational layers. Henceforth, real-world organizations can be modeled and analyzed, as illustrated by a case study, within the DEAL project line. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Emergent Properties of Referral Systems

Agents must decide with whom to interact, which is nontrivial when no central directories are available. A classical decentralized approach is referral systems, where agents adaptively give referrals to one another. We study the emergent properties of referral systems, especially those dealing with their quality, efficiency, and structure. Our key findings are (1) pathological graph structures can emerge due to some neighbor selection policies and (2) if these are avoided, quality and efficiency depend on referral policies. Further, authorities emerge automatically and the extent of their relative authoritativeness depends on the policies