Task: Identify Organizational Rules
Task sourced from Gaia
Purpose

The purpose of this task is to identify the rules that the organization should respect and enforce in its global behavior.

Such rules express constraints on the execution activities of roles and protocols and are of primary importance in promoting efficiency in design and in identifying how the developing MAS can support openness and self-interested behavior.
Relationships
RolesPrimary Performer: Additional Performers:
InputsMandatory:
    		Optional:
      Outputs
        Process Usage
        Main Description

        This task consists of defining the global organizational rules in order to specify: (i) whether and when to allow new agents to enter the organization, and, once accepted, what their position should be; and (ii) which behaviours should be considered as a legitimate expression of self-interest, and which among them must be prevented by the organization (Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology p. 330-331).



        In Gaia,  organizational rules are considered as responsibilities of the organization as a whole. Accordingly, it is possible to distinguish between safety and liveness organizational rules.



        Safety organizational rules define time-independent global invariants for the organization that must be respected.



        Liveness organizational rules define how the dynamics of the organization should evolve over time (i.e., how the execution must evolve).

         

        Organizational rules can be expressed by making use of the same formalism adopted for specifying liveness and safety rules for roles.

         See Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology (p. 348-351) for more information.

        Steps
        Defining organizational liveness rules

         Define how the dynamics of the organization should evolve over time.

         These liveness rules can include, for example, the fact that a role can be played by an entity only after it has already played a given previous role, or that a given protocol may execute only after some other protocol.

        In addition, liveness organizational rules can relate to other liveness expressions belonging to different roles, that is, relating the way different roles can execute specific activities.

        Due to their similar nature, organizational rules can be expressed by making use of the same formalism adopted for specifying liveness and safety rules for roles.
        Defining organizational safety rules

        Define  time-independent global invariants for the organization that must be respected.

        These can include, for example, the fact that a given role must be played by only one entity during the organization’s lifetime or that two roles can never be played by the same entity.

        In addition, they can relate to other safety rules of different roles or to expressions of the environmental variables in different roles.

        Illustrations
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