constraint-based modelling and analysis of organisations
Modern organisations are characterised by a great variety of forms and often involve many actors with diverse goals, performing a wide range of tasks in changing environmental conditions. Due to high complexity, mistakes and inconsistencies are not rare in organisations. To provide better insights into the organisational operation and to identify different types of organisational problems explicit specification of relations and rules, on which the structure and behaviour of an organisation are based, is required. Before it is used, the specification of an organisation should be checked for internal consistency and validity w.r.t. the domain. To this end, the paper introduces a framework for formal specification of constraints that ensure the consistency and validity of organisational specifications. To verify the satisfaction of constraints, efficient and scalable algorithms have been developed and implemented. The framework presented here is based on the organisation modelling framework from [2] which defines four interrelated organisational views (or perspective) with their dedicated predicate logic-based languages: performance-oriented, process-oriented, organisation-oriented and agent-oriented. To express temporal relations, the dedicated languages of the views are embedded into the Temporal Trace Language (TTL) [2], which is a variant of the order-sorted predicate logic. Some of the examples given in the paper are from a case study in the air traffic domain.
constraints organisation modeling consistency of a specification organisation design validity of a specification