Organizational Compliance

Abstract

The motivation of this research comes from the need of devising and evaluating solutions to achieving organizational compliance, which is an important factor in ensuring the success of business operations and the safety of business environments. Using normative multi-agent systems as the basis of conceptual design, the OperA+ framework presented in this dissertation provides formalisms and mechanisms for the representation and evaluation of organizational compliance. By specifying what desired behavior (norms) should be ensured by whom (role enacting agents), OperA+ provides a representation of organizational control. By specifying the preferences of participating agents, OperA+ provides a formalization of individual autonomy. Environmental characteristics of organizational compliance are captured by the notion of contexts. As a result, OperA+ enables a multi-level and multi-context modeling paradigm. This not only enables designers to characterize the situations to which specific compliance requirements are applied, but also adds meaningful links between different levels of descriptions and facilitates the modularization of organizational design. The evaluation of organizational compliance concerns norm conflict, norm compliance and preference satisfaction, which is operationalized via a computational model based on Colored Petri Nets. By unifying the analysis of norm compliance and preference satisfaction, OperA+ facilitates a balance between conformity and autonomy in achieving organizational compliance.