A Formal Framework for Organization Modeling and Analysis

Abstract

This chapter introduces a formal framework for modeling and analys is of organizations. It allows representing and reasoning about all important aspects of artificial and human organizations structured in a number of views, including performance-oriented, process-oriented, powerand interaction-related aspects. The framework provides means to model formal (pre)defined organizational structures and dynamics, informal relations and behavior of organizational actors. The meaning attached to the modeling concepts is specified based on the literature from Social Science. Unlike many existing organization modeling approaches the proposed framework has formal foundations based on the ordersorted predicate logic which enables different types of analysis of organizational specifications of particular views and across views. The framework allows scalability of modeling and analysis of complex organizations, by considering them at different aggregation levels. Furthermore, the framework provides support for real-time management of organizational processes. The framework was applied in several case studies, one of which is discussed here.