Modelling Interactions via Commitments and Expectations

Organizational models often rely on two assumptions: openness and heterogeneity. This is, for instance, the case with organizations consisting of individuals whose behaviour is unpredictable, whose internal structure is unknown, and who do not necessarily share common goals, desires, or intentions. This fact has motivated the adoption of social-based approaches to modelling interaction in organizational models. The idea of social semantics is to abstract away from the agent internals and provide a social meaning to agent message exchanges. In this chapter, we present and discuss two declarative, social semantic approaches for modelling interaction. The first one takes a state-oriented perspective, and models interaction in terms of commitments. The second one adopts a rule-oriented perspective, and models interaction in terms of logical formulae expressing expectations about agent interaction. We use a simple interaction protocol taken from the e-commerce domain to present the functioning and features of the commitment- and expectation-based approaches, and to discuss various forms of reasoning and verification that they accommodate, and how organizational modelling can benefit from them.