A pyramid-shaped system that arranges the relations between the entities within an organization in a top-down way. Power, responsibility and authority are concentrated at the top of the pyramid and decisions flow from the top downwards. The pyramid can be more steep or more flat. A steep pyramid has many layers of management, a flat organization has relatively few (Companion to Organizations, J. Baum, 2002).
Published in Chapter:
Dynamic Specifications for Norm-Governed Systems
Alexander Artikis (National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Greece), Dimosthenis Kaponis (Imperial College London, UK), and Jeremy Pitt (Imperial College London, UK)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 20
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-256-5.ch019
Abstract
We have been developing a framework for executable specification of norm-governed multi-agent systems. In this framework, specification is a design-time activity; moreover, there is no support for run-time modification of the specification. Due to environmental, social, or other conditions, however, it is often desirable, or even necessary, to alter the system specification during the system execution. In this chapter we extend our framework by allowing for “dynamic specifications”, that is, specifications that may be modified at run-time by the members of a system. The framework extension is motivated by Brewka’s “dynamic argument systems”—argument systems in which the rules of order may become the topic of the debate. We illustrate our framework for dynamic specifications by presenting: (i) a dynamic specification of an argumentation protocol, and (ii) an execution of this protocol in which the participating agents modify the protocol specification.