Verification and analysis of organisational change

  • Authors:

  • Mairi McCallum;Wamberto W. Vasconcelos;Timothy J. Norman

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK;Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK;Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

  • Venue:
  • AAMAS'05 Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Agents, Norms and Institutions for Regulated Multi-Agent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In the engineering of multi-agent systems both the analyst and architect may benefit by thinking about the solution in terms of the roles that agents may enact and the relationships between them. The organisational structure thus produced provides an effective way to capture medium- to long-term associations and dependencies between agents. In this paper we propose a means to formally specify, verify and analyse agent organisations, capturing notions of role, obligation and delegation (of obligations). Furthermore, our framework allows change in the organisational structure to be modelled and alternative organisation specifications to be developed in order to handle the consequences of change. Our model gives rise to a suite of tools and functionalities with which engineers can specify, verify and analyse organisations, the roles of their components, their obligations and the relationships among these roles.