Formal analysis of meeting protocols

Abstract

Organizations depend on regular meetings to carry out their everyday tasks. When carried out successfully, meetings offer a common medium for participants to exchange ideas and make decisions. However, many meetings suffer from unfocused discussions or irrelevant dialogues. Within Social Science sometimes general, informal meeting guidelines are formulated. To study meetings in detail, we first formalize general properties for meetings and a generic meeting protocol for the role interactions in meetings that is coherent with such guidelines. In the context of a case study, an example meeting is simulated based on this protocol. The properties are verified in this simulated trace. These properties are also validated by verifying them against a formalisation of empirical data of a real meeting in the same context. A comparison of the two traces reveals that a real meeting is more robust in the sense that exception violations of the protocol may occur, and these exceptions are handled effectively without damaging the success of the meeting. Given this observation, a more refined protocol is specified that includes exception-handling strategies. Based on this refined protocol a meeting is simulated that closely resembles the real meeting. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.