a formal road from institutional norms to organizational structures
Up to now, the way institutions and organizations have been used in the development of open systems has not often gone further than a useful heuristics. In order to develop systems actually implementing institutions and organizations, formal methods should take the place of heuristic ones. The paper presents a formal semantics for the notion of institution and its components (abstract and concrete norms, empowerment of agents, roles) and defines a formal relation between institutions and organizational structures. As a result, it is shown how institutional norms can be refined to constructs---organizational structures---which are closer to an implemented system. It is also shown how such a refinement process can be fully formalized and it is therefore amenable to rigorous verification.
institutions norms organizational structures logic