A formal framework for modeling and analysis of organizations

Abstract

This paper introduces a formal framework for modeling and analysis of organizations. It allows representing a great variety of organizational concepts and relations that are structured into a number of dedicated perspectives (or views), similar to the ones defined in GERAM [3]. In contrast to many existing enterprise architectures the proposed framework has formal foundations based on the order-sorted predicate logic. This formal basis enables different types of analysis of organizational specifications both of particular views and across different views. Furthermore, the framework provides support for real time management of organizational processes. The framework has been applied in a number of case studies, one of which is discussed in this paper. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.