Bureaucracies as deontic systems

Lee, Ronald M.

doi:10.1145/45941.45944

Cited by 71 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Recently, deontic logic has been applied to the specification of software systems, in particular to the specification of information systems. Lee [31] applies traditional deontic logic as developed by Von Wright [52] to system specification, but others have developed new branches of deontic logic that are more suitable to software specification than the more traditional one. Fiadeiro and Maibaum [13] extend temporal logic with deontic operators, Khosla and Maibaum [28,29], Van der Meyden [32], as well as Meyer [10,34] extend dynamic logic [20,30] with deontic operators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Actors, actions, and initiative in normative system specification

Wieringa

Meyer

1993

Ann Math Artif Intell

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The logic of norms, called deontic logic, has been used to specify normative constraints for information systems. For example, one can specify in deontic logic the constraints that a book borrowed from a library should be returned within three weeks, and that if it is not returned, the library should send a reminder. Thus, the notion of obligation to perform an action arises naturally in system specification. Intuitively, deontic logic presupposes the concept of an actor who undertakes actions and is responsible for fulfilling obligations. However, the concept of an actor has not been formalized until now in deontic logic. We present a formalization in dynamic logic, which allows us to express the actor who initiates actions or choices. This is then combined with a formalization, presented earlier, of deontic logic in dynamic logic, which allows us to specify obligations, permissions, and prohibitions to perform an action. The addition of actors allows us to express who has the responsibility to perform an action. In addition to the application of the concept of an actor in deontic logic, we discuss two other applications of actors. First, we show how to generalize an approach taken up by De Nicola and Hennessy, who eliminate ~ from CCS in favor of internal and external choice. We show that our generalization allows a more accurate specification of system behavior than is possible without it. Second, we show that actors can be used to resolve a long-standing paradox of deontie logic, called the paradox of free-choice permission. Towards the end of the paper, we discuss whether the concept of an actor can be combined with that of an object to formalize the concept of active objects. IntroductionDeontic logic is the logic of permissions, prohibitions, and obligations. Surveys of several deontic logics that have been devised in the past have been given by A1 [20,30] with deontic operators. In earlier papers, we applied Meyer's logic to the specification of conceptual models of information systems [48,51]. We take this application as the point of departure in this paper. The approach is extended with the concept of an actor, and we start with listing some of the reasons why we want to do this. This paper is a revision and an extension of two abstracts that appeared earlier [37,49]. Those abstracts contained a formalization of actors, active choice, that we have replaced, in the current paper, by a formalization in terms of passive and active choices. This allows us to simplify the approach at some points, while at the same time making it more expressive. THE SYSTEM AS ACTOR IN THE UoDIn an earlier paper [48], we specified a library in which an administration of books and library members is maintained. Members can borrow a book for three weeks, and are then obliged to return it. If they do not return it, the library will send a reminder. This is specified in the current version of the logic as Vp, b[borrow(p; b)Formula (1) says that after occurrence of the event borrow(p; b), the obligation predicate O(retur...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Actors, actions, and initiative in normative system specification

Wieringa

Meyer

1993

Ann Math Artif Intell

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“…Lee [1988] presents a rule-based language intended for specifying permitted, obligatory and forbidden actions. The example used for illustration concerns the rules governing parking in a University car park.…”

Section: Preliminary Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The example is a modified version of the car park example in [Lee 1988] that was discussed briefly in Section 2. It concerns the specification of which categories of staff are permitted and not permitted to park in a car park.…”

Section: Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

A computational theory of normative positions

Sergot

2001

ACM Trans. Comput. Logic

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The Kanger-Lindahl theory of normative positions attempts to use a combination of deontic logic (the logic of obligation and permission) and a logic of action/agency to give a formal account of obligations, duties, rights, and other complex normative concepts. This paper presents a generalisation and further development of this theory, together with methods for its automation and application to practical examples. The resulting theory is intended to be applied in the representation and analysis of laws, regulations, and contracts, in the specification of aspects of computer systems, in multi-agent systems, and as a contribution to the formal theory of organisations. Particular attention is paid to representations at varying levels of detail and the relationships that hold between them. The last part presents Norman-G, an automated support system intended to facilitate application of the theory to the analysis of practical problems, with a small example to illustrate its use.

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“…The work apparently closest to our interests is [Lee 1988], which proposes the use of deontic logic for the description of bureaucratic systems and authority hierarchies. He uses a language similar to Prolog to record the deontic status of users and actions.…”

Section: Deontic Logicmentioning

confidence: 99%

The representation of policies as system objects

Moffett

Sloman

1991

SIGOIS Bull.

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This is an exploratory paper in which we describe aspects of management policy which could be modelled as objects in a distributed computer system, in order to enable them to be queried and manipulated. Policies are 'the plans of an organisation to meet its goals'. They are persistent entities which are intended to influence actions, either by motivating actions or by authorising them. This distinction reflects the observation that agents only successfully carry out actions if they are both motivated and empowered to do so. In addition to persistence, policies have other main characteristics: they are directed to subjects; they are typic ally organised in hierarchies in which the goal of a policy is achieved by creating lower-level policies until identifiable actions are completed; and policies may conflict, so they require to have a precedence ordering.There is a need to represent and manipulate policies, as objects within the computer system, so that they can be used to influence the activities of automated managers within large distributed computer systems. We describe a possible structure for policy objects and the operations which can be performed on them. Their attributes include: modality (positive or negative motivation or authorisation); policy subjects, goals, and target objects; and the constraints which may apply. The method of representation of relationships between policies is left as an open issue.Related work and concepts in the modelling of policies are referred to, including a brief discussion of security models in this context. The open issues raised by this paper are described.

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Bureaucracies as deontic systems

Cited by 71 publications

References 10 publications

Actors, actions, and initiative in normative system specification

Actors, actions, and initiative in normative system specification

A computational theory of normative positions

The representation of policies as system objects

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