A modal action logic based framework for organization specification and analysis

Abstract

This paper proposes a logic-oriented framework for the specification and analysis of organizations. Within this framework, an organization is seen as a multi-agent society where each agent has some “capabilities” and where agents interact according to some forms of “institutionalized power relations”. Modal action logics, of the type developed in the Philosophy area, are used to reason about agent's agency and interaction.

In spite of its simplicity (and limitations), the proposed framework allows us to deal, at an appropriate level of abstraction, with some fundamental issues in an organization, like the responsibility for some task, task decomposition, etc. Moreover, it can be used to support the automation of some aspects of the organization's activity and interaction with external users, being already possible to use a workbench to answer questions like “can agent x ensure task A?”, “what should x do to obtain task A?”, and “to whom should a user go (in e.g. a public service) to solve problem A?”.

The workbench uses a tableaux theorem proving method extended with some additional rules to deal with the proposed classical action modalities.