Formal Analysis of Meeting Protocols

Organizations depend on regular meetings to carry out their everyday tasks. When carried out successfully, meetings offer a common medium for participants to exchange ideas and make decisions. However, many meetings suffer from unfocused discussions or irrelevant dialogues. Within Social Science general, informal meeting guidelines are sometimes formulated. To study meetings in detail, we first formalize general properties of meetings and a generic meeting protocol for the role interactions in meetings that is coherent with such guidelines. This generic protocol is used as a starting point to study real-life meetings. First an example meeting is simulated based on the generic meeting protocol. The general properties are formally verified in the simulation trace. Next, these properties are also verified formally against empirical data of a real meeting in the same context. A comparison of the two traces reveals that a real meeting is more robust since when exceptions happen and the prop...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: MABS
• Authors: Catholijn M. Jonker, Martijn C. Schut, Jan Treur, Pinar Yolum
• Keywords: Generic Meeting Protocol, MABS 2004, Meeting, Real Meeting