Many real-life organizations are hierarchies of largely autonomous, heterogeneous members (individuals or other organizations), often exhibiting rich policies. We restrict our attention to organizations that monitor their environment, collate events, determine compliance of their behaviors with their policies, and potentially act in anticipation of events to ensure the satisfaction of their policies. This paper models cross-organizational service agreements as resulting in the formation of organizations. This paper emphasizes the importance of proactive policy-based governance in organizations (modeled as multiagent systems) and provides a novel architecture supporting policy monitoring, governance, and enactment. This paper provides an initial formalization and discusses the compliance and completeness of behaviors produced from specified policies. To demonstrate the practical utility of this approach, it is implemented using an existing policy engine and messaging middleware.
Yathiraj B. Udupi, Munindar P. Singh