Refers to how relationships are structured between leaders and subordinates in organizations. It represents the number of people/subordinates that can be effectively managed by one manager. The optimal Span of Control is dependent upon the nature of the work of the subordinates, the skills, capabilities, experience, seniority, qualifications of the managers and subordinates, the use of information technology, the detail at which work rules and procedures have been formalized and are known by the subordinates, the applied management style and the desired depth of the hierarchy in an organization (Companion to Organizations, J. Baum Eds., Oxford Blackwell, UK, 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.