Abstract
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. To study meetings in detail, we first formalize general properties of meetings and a generic meeting protocol to specify how roles in a meeting should interact to realize these properties. This generic protocol is used as a starting point to study real-life meetings. Next, an example meeting is simulated using 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 rules of the protocol are violated, these exceptions are handled effectively. Given this observation, a more refined protocol is specified that includes exception-handling strategies. Based on this refined protocol a meeting is simulated that closely resembles the real meeting. This protocol is then validated against another set of data from another real meeting. By iteratively adding exception handling rules, the protocol is enhanced to handle a variety of situations successfully.
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Catholijn M. Jonker is a full professor in Man Machine Interaction of the Delft University of technology in The Netherlands. She studied computer science at Utrecht University. She completed her PhD on the topic of Negations and Constraints in Logic Programming at the same university. After completing a post-doc position on the same topic at the Universität Bern, she became an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and switched her research topic to agent technology. During the time at the Vrije Universiteit her interest in cognitive science increased, which she combined with her work on modeling multi-agent systems and organizations and her work on the analysis and modeling of the dynamics of behavior of complex systems. After working for the Vrije Universiteit she became a full professor in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information of the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen in The Netherlands. First in Nijmegen and now in Delft she continues her research along the same lines.
Martijn C. Schut is Assistant Professor at the Department of Artificial Intelligence, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He received a MSc from the Vrije Universiteit (NL) and a PhD from the University of Liverpool (UK). His research interests concern the emergence of organizational dynamics in distributed multi-agent systems.
Jan Treur received his Ph.D. in Mathematics and Logic in 1976 from Utrecht University. Since 1986 he works in Artificial Intelligence, from 1990 as a full professor and head of the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In the 1990s he headed a research program on component-based design of knowledge-based and agent systems. In the last five years the research program focused on modeling dynamics of agent systems in practical application areas, and related to other disciplines such as Biology, Cognitive Science, Organization Theory, and Philosophy of Mind.
Pınar Yolum is an assistant professor at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She received her PhD and MS in computer science from North Carolina State University in 2003 and 2000, respectively, and her BSc in computer engineering from Marmara University, Istanbul in 1998. She worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research interests include multiagent systems and service-oriented computing.
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Jonker, C.M., Schut, M.C., Treur, J. et al. Analysis of meeting protocols by formalisation, simulation, and verification. Comput Math Organiz Theor 13, 283–314 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-006-9001-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-006-9001-8