endoskeletal kernel 1 · lib 2026.09

Reference

Research curriculum

Endoskeletal was designed from a curated reading of 145 published frameworks in 19 fields, from enterprise architecture and decision rights to deontic logic, provenance and agent safety. This page lists every one of them, who created it, and the primary works it was read from.

19families
145frameworks
628primary works
2layers

How to read this

The curriculum has two layers. The first nine families describe what an organization is and how it is governed: practitioner frameworks for how companies are actually built and run, and the academic theory that explains them. The other ten supply what a machine needs to run a specification: requirements and refinement, execution semantics, provenance, evidence and uncertainty, composition, the economics of information, self-adaptation, authorization, AI participants, and computable norms.

Each entry gives the framework, the people or bodies who originated it, when, who maintains it now if anyone does, a one-line description, and its primary works: the original books, papers, standards and specifications. Secondary explainers are left out. Every framework was first read into a structured summary in Endoskeletal's research knowledge base. Citations in the systems-side families were checked against publisher, DOI and standards-body records; where a detail could not be confirmed it is marked details unverified.

The whole list is also available as data at /research.json, with the same families, frameworks and works.

What an organization is and how it is governed
Practitioner frameworks for how real organizations are built and run, and the academic theory underneath them.

1 Organizational architecture

Capabilities, value streams, organization units and the governance that keeps them aligned. 11 frameworks

TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework)

The Open Group · 1995–present

A vendor-neutral enterprise architecture methodology whose Architecture Development Method is a phased cycle for developing and governing business, data, application and technology architecture.

BIZBOK (Business Architecture Body of Knowledge)

Business Architecture Guild · c. 2011–2012–present

An IT-independent business architecture guide built on interlocking capability, value stream, organization, information and strategy maps and the matrices that cross-reference them.

APQC Process Classification Framework (PCF)

APQC (American Productivity & Quality Center) · 1992–present

A numerically coded, five-level taxonomy of cross-functional business processes with a cross-industry version and sector-specific editions.

SCOR Model (Supply Chain Operations Reference Model)

PRTM, AMR Research, Supply Chain Council · 1996–present · maintained by Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM)

A cross-industry reference model that describes, measures and benchmarks supply-chain processes using a process hierarchy, performance attributes and metrics.

BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network)

BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) · 2008–present

A banking-specific semantic reference architecture that decomposes banking capability into business areas, business domains and service domains down to API-level operations.

Zachman Framework (Enterprise Ontology)

John A. Zachman · 1987–present · maintained by Zachman International

A six-by-six classification ontology that organizes enterprise description artifacts by six interrogatives and six stakeholder perspectives; it is a taxonomy, not a method.

ArchiMate

Telematica Instituut consortium, The Open Group · first published 2002–2004

A formal open modeling language for enterprise architecture with layered element types, aspects, typed relationships, viewpoints and an XML exchange format.

Galbraith Star Model

Jay R. Galbraith · 1970s–1990s

An organization-design model of five interdependent policy areas (Strategy, Structure, Processes, Rewards, People) that must be aligned with one another.

  • Galbraith, J. R. (1973). Designing Complex Organizations.
  • Galbraith, J. R. Designing Organizations.

Operating Model Canvas (OMC)

Andrew Campbell, Mikel Gutierrez, Mark Lancelott · 2017

A six-block canvas (POLISM: Processes, Organization, Locations, Information, Suppliers, Management System) for designing an organization's operating model.

McKinsey 7-S Framework

Tom Peters, Robert Waterman, Richard Pascale, Anthony Athos · late 1970s

A diagnostic model of seven interdependent elements (three hard, four soft) centered on shared values, used to check organizational alignment.

  • Peters, T. J., & Waterman, R. H. (1982). In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies. Harper & Row.

Viable System Model (VSM)

Stafford Beer · 1960s–1970s · maintained by Metaphorum

A cybernetics-based model holding that any viable organization contains five recursive subsystems (operations, coordination, control, intelligence, policy) at every level of scale.

  • Beer, S. (1972). Brain of the Firm. Allen Lane (2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons, 1981).
  • Beer, S. (1979). The Heart of Enterprise. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Beer, S. (1985). Diagnosing the System for Organizations. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Beer, S. (1959). Cybernetics and Management. English Universities Press.
  • Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall.
  • Ashby, W. R. (1958). Requisite Variety and Its Implications for the Control of Complex Systems.
  • Metaphorum. Viable System Model overview.

2 Software delivery and agile at scale

Team topology, delivery flow, roles and ceremonies, and delivery and productivity metrics. 9 frameworks

Team Topologies

Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais · 2019–present · maintained by Team Topologies (teamtopologies.com)

An organization-design model for technology teams built on four team types, three interaction modes and cognitive-load limits.

Accelerate / DORA

Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim · 2014–present · maintained by Google Cloud DORA

An empirical research program that links delivery capabilities to software delivery and organizational performance via the four key metrics and a capabilities model.

  • Forsgren, N., Humble, J., & Kim, G. (2018). Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. IT Revolution Press.
  • DORA. DORA official research site. Google Cloud DORA.
  • DORA (2024). DORA Report 2024 (Accelerate State of DevOps Report). DORA / Google Cloud. dora.dev
  • DORA (2025). State of AI-assisted Software Development 2025. DORA / Google Cloud. dora.dev
  • DORA. DORA Capabilities catalog. DORA / Google Cloud.

SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

Dean Leffingwell, Scaled Agile, Inc. · 2011–present

A proprietary, widely adopted framework for scaling Lean and Agile practices across teams, trains, large solutions and portfolios.

LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum)

Craig Larman, Bas Vodde · 2010–present

A minimalist framework for applying Scrum to many teams on one product, using feature teams, a single Product Owner and Requirement Areas at very large scale.

  • Larman, C., & Vodde, B. (2010). Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development. Addison-Wesley.
  • Larman, C., & Vodde, B. (2016). Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS. Addison-Wesley.
  • Larman, C., & Vodde, B. LeSS official site.
  • Larman, C., & Vodde, B. LeSS Framework Introduction.

Disciplined Agile (DA)

Scott Ambler, Mark Lines · 2012–present · maintained by Project Management Institute (PMI)

A goal-driven toolkit of toolkits that helps teams choose their way of working from process goals, six lifecycles and layered DevOps and enterprise guidance.

Kanban Method

David J. Anderson · 2010–present · maintained by Kanban University

An evolutionary change method for managing knowledge work through visualized flow, WIP limits, explicit policies and cadences.

  • Anderson, D. J. (2010). Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business. Blue Hole Press.
  • Kanban University. Kanban University official site.
  • Kanban University. The Official Guide to The Kanban Method. kanban.university
  • Kanban University. The Official Kanban Guide (A4 PDF). resources.kanban.university
  • Anderson, D. J. Revisiting the Principles and General Practices of the Kanban Method. David J. Anderson School of Management. djaa.com

Flow Framework / Project to Product

Mik Kersten · 2018–present · maintained by Planview

A value-stream management model that tracks four flow item types and five flow metrics to give business leaders portfolio-level visibility.

SPACE Framework

Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, Jenna Butler · 2021

A five-dimension framework (Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, Efficiency and flow) for measuring developer productivity without relying on a single metric.

Scrum@Scale

Jeff Sutherland · 2018–present · maintained by Scrum Inc.

A scale-free framework that links Scrum teams into a network using a dual Scrum Master and Product Owner coordination cycle.

3 End-to-end business processes

The cross-functional backbone that recurs in almost every company: stages, owners and KPIs. 7 frameworks

Order-to-Cash (O2C)

The revenue cycle from customer order through billing, collections and cash application, spanning sales, fulfillment and finance.

Procure-to-Pay (P2P)

The purchasing cycle from requisition and sourcing through goods receipt, invoice matching and supplier payment.

Record-to-Report (R2R)

The accounting and financial-close backbone from transaction recording and reconciliation through consolidation and financial reporting.

Hire-to-Retire (H2R)

The employee lifecycle from workforce planning and recruiting through onboarding, payroll, development and offboarding.

Acquire-to-Retire (A2R)

The fixed-asset lifecycle from capital acquisition through capitalization, depreciation, tracking and disposal.

Plan-to-Perform (FP&A Budgeting & Planning Backbone)

The financial planning cycle from strategic planning and budget construction through rolling forecasts and variance reporting.

Idea-to-Market / Stage-Gate Process

Robert G. Cooper, Scott Edgett · early 1980s–present · maintained by Stage-Gate International

A new-product development governance model in which an idea passes through staged work separated by go/kill/hold/recycle gates run by cross-functional gatekeepers.

4 Budgeting and financial governance

Planning philosophies and the control and accountability structures over money. 6 frameworks

Beyond Budgeting

Jeremy Hope, Robin Fraser · 1998–present · maintained by Beyond Budgeting Institute

A management model of twelve principles (six leadership, six management process) that replaces fixed annual budgets with adaptive, decentralized, relative-target management.

Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB)

Peter Pyhrr · 1970s

A budgeting method in which every budget is rebuilt from zero each cycle using decision units, decision packages and a ranked funding cutoff.

  • Pyhrr, P. (1973). Zero-Base Budgeting.
  • McKinsey & Company. Zero-based budgeting revisited: Why this time is different. mckinsey.com
  • McKinsey & Company. The truth about zero-based budgeting: ZBB for consumer-goods players. mckinsey.com
  • McKinsey & Company. Five myths (and realities) about zero-based budgeting. mckinsey.com
  • McKinsey & Company. The return of zero base budgeting. mckinsey.com
  • Deloitte. Zero-based budgeting. deloitte.com

COSO Internal Control – Integrated Framework

Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) · 1992–present

The dominant global standard for designing and assessing internal control, organized as five components and seventeen principles.

COSO Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Framework

COSO, PwC · 2004–present

COSO's framework that integrates risk management with strategy-setting and performance, organized as five components and twenty principles.

  • COSO (2004). Enterprise Risk Management – Integrated Framework.
  • COSO / PwC (2017). Enterprise Risk Management—Integrating with Strategy and Performance. COSO (distributed via The IIA Bookstore). theiia.org
  • COSO / PwC (2017). Enterprise Risk Management—Integrating with Strategy and Performance: Executive Summary. COSO. static.poder360.com.br
  • COSO. COSO guidance on enterprise risk management.

The IIA Three Lines Model

The Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) · 2013–present

The IIA's governance model that assigns risk ownership, oversight and independent assurance across a governing body and three lines of roles.

Driver-Based Planning / Rolling Forecasts

Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), APQC

A practice cluster that ties forecasts to measurable operational drivers and refreshes them on a rolling cadence instead of a static annual budget.

5 Decision-making

Decision rights, delegation, situational decision style, and why real decisions depart from their design. 12 frameworks

RACI Matrix

1950s–1970s

A responsibility-assignment matrix tagging each role on a task as Responsible, Accountable, Consulted or Informed.

RAPID Framework

Paul Rogers, Marcia Blenko · 2006 · maintained by Bain & Company

A five-role decision-rights framework (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) for assigning authority over a single high-stakes decision.

  • Rogers, P. & Blenko, M. (2006). Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance. Harvard Business Review (January 2006). hbr.org
  • Bain & Company. Who has the 'D'?.

DACI Framework

Intuit · maintained by Atlassian

A lightweight team-level decision-rights framework naming a Driver, Approver, Contributors and Informed parties.

Kepner-Tregoe Decision Analysis

Charles H. Kepner, Benjamin B. Tregoe · early 1960s · maintained by Kepner-Tregoe, Inc.

A structured rational method for choosing among alternatives using MUST and WANT criteria, weighted scoring and adverse-consequence assessment.

  • Kepner, C.H. & Tregoe, B.B. (1965). The Rational Manager.
  • Kepner, C.H. & Tregoe, B.B. (1981). The New Rational Manager.
  • Kepner-Tregoe, Inc. Kepner-Tregoe official site.

Delegation Poker / 7 Levels of Delegation

Jurgen Appelo · 2010–2011 · maintained by Management 3.0

A facilitation game and seven-level scale for making explicit how much decision authority a manager cedes to a team.

Amazon's Type 1 / Type 2 Decisions (One-Way vs. Two-Way Doors)

Jeff Bezos · 2015–2016 · maintained by Amazon

A classification of decisions by reversibility that prescribes slow, deliberate process for irreversible ones and fast, delegated process for reversible ones.

Cynefin Framework

Dave Snowden, Cynthia Kurtz, Mary Boone · 1999–present · maintained by The Cynefin Company

A sense-making framework sorting situations into Clear, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Confused domains, each calling for a different decision approach.

  • Kurtz, C.F. & Snowden, D.J. (2003). The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world. IBM Systems Journal, 42(3). ieeexplore.ieee.org
  • Snowden, D. & Boone, M. (2007). A Leader's Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review (November 2007). hbr.org
  • The Cynefin Co. Cynefin framework overview.

OODA Loop

John Boyd · 1950s–1990s

A continuous Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle model in which faster, better-oriented cycling gets an actor inside a rival's decision loop.

  • Boyd, J. Patterns of Conflict (briefing). Defense and the National Interest. dnipogo.org
  • Osinga, F.P.B. (2007). Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd. Routledge (Eburon Academic Publishers, 2005). routledge.com

Vroom-Yetton-Jago Normative Decision Model

Victor Vroom, Philip Yetton, Arthur Jago · 1973–1988

A normative decision-tree model prescribing how autocratic or participative a leader's decision style should be given the decision's characteristics.

  • Vroom, V.H. & Yetton, P.W. (1973). Leadership and Decision-Making. University of Pittsburgh Press.
  • Vroom, V.H. & Jago, A.G. (1988). The New Leadership: Managing Participation in Organizations. Prentice-Hall.
  • Vroom, V.H. (2000). Leadership and the Decision-Making Process. Organizational Dynamics, 28(4).

Bounded Rationality & the Behavioral Theory of the Firm

Herbert A. Simon, Richard M. Cyert, James G. March · 1947–1963

Simon's bounded rationality and satisficing together with Cyert and March's coalition-and-routines theory of how firms actually decide.

  • Simon, H.A. (1947). Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization. Macmillan.
  • Simon, H.A. (1956). Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment. Psychological Review, 63(2).
  • Simon, H.A. (1978). Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations (Nobel Memorial Prize Lecture). Nobel Prize. nobelprize.org
  • Cyert, R.M. & March, J.G. (1963). A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Prentice-Hall.

The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice

Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, Johan P. Olsen · 1972

A model of decision-making in organized anarchies as the near-random meeting of problem, solution, participant and choice-opportunity streams.

  • Cohen, M.D., March, J.G., & Olsen, J.P. (1972). A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1-25. jstor.org

Believability-Weighted Decision Making

Ray Dalio · 2017 · maintained by Bridgewater Associates

An idea-meritocracy system that weights each person's opinion by demonstrated track record and reasoning, operationalized in Bridgewater's Dot Collector.

6 Computational organization models

Formal role, norm and mission models for organizations of software agents: the closest prior art. 6 frameworks

Gaia Methodology

Michael Wooldridge, Nicholas Jennings, David Kinny, Franco Zambonelli · 2000–2003

An agent-oriented analysis and design methodology that treats a multi-agent system as an organization of roles with responsibilities, permissions, activities and protocols.

  • Wooldridge, M., Jennings, N. R., & Kinny, D. (2000). The Gaia Methodology for Agent-Oriented Analysis and Design. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 3(3), 285–312. cs.ox.ac.uk
  • Zambonelli, F., Jennings, N. R., & Wooldridge, M. (2003). Developing Multiagent Systems: The Gaia Methodology. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 12(3), 317–370. dl.acm.org
  • Zambonelli, F., Jennings, N. R., & Wooldridge, M. A Framework for Patterns in Gaia. University of Southampton ePrints. eprints.soton.ac.uk

MOISE / MOISE+

Jomi F. Hübner, Jaime S. Sichman, Olivier Boissier · 2002–2004

An organizational modeling language separating structural, functional and deontic specifications of a multi-agent organization.

  • Hübner, J. F., Sichman, J. S., & Boissier, O. (2002). A Model for the Structural, Functional, and Deontic Specification of Organizations in Multiagent Systems. SBIA 2002, LNAI 2507, Springer. moise.sourceforge.net
  • Hübner, J. F., Sichman, J. S., & Boissier, O. MOISE+: Towards a Structural, Functional, and Deontic Model for MAS Organization. HAL (Mines Saint-Étienne). hal-emse.ccsd.cnrs.fr
  • Hübner, J. F., Sichman, J. S., & Boissier, O. S-MOISE+: A Middleware for Developing Organised Multi-agent Systems. academia.edu
  • Hübner, J. F., Boissier, O., Kitio, R., & Ricci, A. From Organisation Specification to Normative Programming in Multi-Agent Organisations. Springer. link.springer.com
  • MOISE project. MOISE project homepage. SourceForge.

OperA

Virginia Dignum · 2004

A framework for specifying agent organizations through organizational, interaction and normative structures, with contracts binding autonomous agents to roles.

  • Dignum, V. (2004). A Model for Organizational Interaction: Based on Agents, Concepts for Design and Implementation. PhD thesis, Utrecht University. webdoc.sub.gwdg.de
  • Dignum, V., & Dignum, F. Formal Specification of Interaction in Agent Societies. cs.le.ac.uk
  • Aldewereld, H., & Dignum, V. (2010). OperettA: Organization-Oriented Development Environment. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 627 (LADS 2010). ceur-ws.org
  • Dignum, V., et al. (2005). Organizing Multiagent Systems. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. link.springer.com
  • Dignum, V. An Agent-Based Inter-organizational Collaboration Framework: OperA+. Springer. link.springer.com

AGR (Agent/Group/Role) Model

Jacques Ferber, Olivier Gutknecht · 1998

A minimalist organizational model using only groups and roles, composed bottom-up with group-scoped communication and no global structure.

  • Ferber, J., & Gutknecht, O. (1998). A Meta-Model for the Analysis and Design of Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems. ICMAS'98, IEEE.
  • Gutknecht, O., & Ferber, J. (2000). The MadKit Agent Platform Architecture. Infrastructure for Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Scalable Multi-Agent Systems, LNCS 1887, Springer. dl.acm.org
  • Ferber, J., Gutknecht, O., & Michel, F. (2003). From Agents to Organizations: an Organizational View of Multi-Agent Systems. AAMAS 2003 AOSE-IV workshop. madkit.net
  • MadKit project. MadKit project homepage.

Electronic Institutions

Marc Esteva, Carles Sierra, Josep Lluís Arcos, Juan Antonio Rodríguez-Aguilar, Pablo Noriega · late 1990s–2000s · maintained by IIIA-CSIC

An institution model of scenes, a speech-act dialogical framework and normative rules, specified in ISLANDER and enforced at runtime by AMELI.

  • Esteva, M., Rodríguez-Aguilar, J. A., Sierra, C., Garcia, P., & Arcos, J. L. (2001). On the Formal Specification of Electronic Institutions. Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce, LNAI 1991, Springer.
  • Esteva, M., et al. ISLANDER: An Electronic Institutions Editor. researchgate.net
  • Esteva, M., Rodríguez-Aguilar, J. A., Rosell, B., & Arcos, J. L. AMELI: An Agent-based Middleware for Electronic Institutions. researchgate.net
  • Sierra, C., Rodríguez-Aguilar, J. A., Noriega, P., Esteva, M., & Arcos, J. L. Engineering Multi-Agent Systems as Electronic Institutions. iiia.csic.es
  • Noriega, P., Padget, J., et al. Designing Institutional Multi-Agent Systems. Springer. link.springer.com
  • Campos, J., Esteva, M., et al. Formalising Situated Normative Systems. IIIA-CSIC. iiia.csic.es
  • Bogdanovych, A., et al. 3D Electronic Institutions: Social Interfaces for E-Commerce. IIIA-CSIC. iiia.csic.es

JaCaMo

Olivier Boissier, Rafael H. Bordini, Jomi F. Hübner, Alessandro Ricci, Andrea Santi · 2011–present · maintained by jacamo-lang (GitHub organization)

An executable multi-agent platform integrating Jason BDI agents, CArtAgO artifacts and Moise organizations.

7 Organizational theory and institutional economics

Why firm boundaries, delegation, institutions, learning and coordination take the shape they do. 6 frameworks

Transaction Cost Economics (Coase & Williamson)

Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson · 1937–1985

A theory explaining firm boundaries and governance choice through the costs of using markets, driven by asset specificity, uncertainty and frequency.

  • Coase, R.H. (1937). The Nature of the Firm. Economica, 4(16), 386-405.
  • Williamson, O.E. (1975). Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications. Free Press.
  • Williamson, O.E. (1985). The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting. Free Press.
  • Williamson, O.E. (2009). Transaction Cost Economics: The Natural Progression (Nobel Prize Lecture). Nobel Prize. nobelprize.org

Principal-Agent Theory & Contract Theory

Michael C. Jensen, William H. Meckling, Sanford Grossman, Oliver Hart, John Moore · 1976–1990

Agency-cost theory of delegated authority plus incomplete-contracts theory of residual control rights and the boundary of the firm.

  • Jensen, M.C. & Meckling, W.H. (1976). Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure. Journal of Financial Economics, 3(4), 305-360. sfu.ca
  • Grossman, S.J. & Hart, O.D. (1986). The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration. Journal of Political Economy, 94(4), 691-719.
  • Hart, O. & Moore, J. (1990). Property Rights and the Nature of the Firm. Journal of Political Economy, 98(6), 1119-1158.
  • Hart, O. (2016). Incomplete Contracts and Control (Nobel Prize Lecture). Nobel Prize. nobelprize.org

Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework

Elinor Ostrom · 1980s–present · maintained by Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University

A diagnostic framework analyzing action arenas through seven types of rules-in-use, with empirically derived design principles for commons governance.

  • Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
  • Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton University Press.
  • Ostrom, E. (2011). Background on the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework. Policy Studies Journal, 39(1), 7-27. gpde.direito.ufmg.br
  • Ostrom, E. (2009). Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems (Nobel Prize Lecture). Nobel Prize. nobelprize.org
  • Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University. IAD Framework. Indiana University.

Organizational Learning (March, Argyris & Schön, Senge)

James G. March, Chris Argyris, Donald Schön, Peter Senge · 1976–1991

Three linked theories of organizational adaptation: exploration versus exploitation, single- and double-loop learning, and the five-discipline learning organization.

  • March, J.G. (1991). Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning. Organization Science, 2(1), 71-87. sjbae.pbworks.com
  • Argyris, C. & Schön, D.A. (1978). Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Addison-Wesley.
  • Argyris, C. (1976). Single-Loop and Double-Loop Models in Research on Decision Making. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(3), 363-375.
  • Senge, P.M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday/Currency.

Evolutionary Economics & Organizational Ecology (Nelson & Winter, Hannan & Freeman)

Richard R. Nelson, Sidney G. Winter, Michael T. Hannan, John Freeman · 1977–1982

Evolutionary theory of firm routines under variation and selection, plus population-level ecology of organizational founding and mortality.

  • Nelson, R.R. & Winter, S.G. (1982). An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
  • Hannan, M.T. & Freeman, J. (1977). The Population Ecology of Organizations. American Journal of Sociology, 82(5), 929-964. iot.ntnu.no
  • Hannan, M.T. & Freeman, J. (1989). Organizational Ecology. Harvard University Press.

Coordination Theory (Malone & Crowston)

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston · 1994

A theory defining coordination as managing dependencies between activities, with a taxonomy pairing dependency types with coordination mechanisms.

  • Malone, T.W. & Crowston, K. (1994). The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination. ACM Computing Surveys, 26(1), 87-119. crowston.syr.edu
  • Malone, T.W. & Crowston, K. Toward an Interdisciplinary Theory of Coordination. MIT Center for Coordination Science Working Paper CCSWP157. ccs.mit.edu
  • Malone, T.W. & Crowston, K. (2003). Coordination Theory: A Ten-Year Retrospective. Human-Computer Interaction in Management Information Systems.
  • Crowston, K. & Osborn, C.S. (2003). A Coordination Theory Approach to Process Description and Redesign. Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook, MIT Press.

8 Enterprise and foundational ontologies

Logically precise definitions of role, event, resource, commitment and organizational identity. 6 frameworks

REA Ontology (Resources-Events-Agents)

William E. McCarthy, Guido Geerts · 1982–present

An ontology of economic exchange built on resources, events and agents with a mandatory give-to-get duality constraint.

  • McCarthy, W. E. (1982). The REA Accounting Model: A Generalized Framework for Accounting Systems in a Shared Data Environment. The Accounting Review, 57(3), 554–578. researchgate.net
  • Geerts, G. L., & McCarthy, W. E. (2000/2002). The Ontological Foundation of REA Enterprise Information Systems. researchgate.net

TOVE (TOronto Virtual Enterprise) Ontology

Michael Gruninger, Mark S. Fox · early 1990s · maintained by Enterprise Integration Laboratory, University of Toronto

A first-order-logic enterprise ontology of activity, time, resource, organization structure, cost and quality, validated through competency questions.

  • Fox, M. S. The TOVE Project: Towards a Common-Sense Model of the Enterprise. eil.mie.utoronto.ca
  • Fox, M. S., Barbuceanu, M., Gruninger, M., & Lin, J. An Organisation Ontology for Enterprise Modelling.
  • Gruninger, M., & Fox, M. S. (1994). The Role of Competency Questions in Enterprise Engineering. IFIP WG5.7 Workshop on Benchmarking. eil.utoronto.ca
  • Enterprise Integration Laboratory, University of Toronto. TOVE project pages. University of Toronto.

UFO (Unified Foundational Ontology) & OntoUML

Giancarlo Guizzardi · 2005–present · maintained by NEMO, Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES)

A foundational ontology with kind, role, phase and relator distinctions, operationalized as the OntoUML conceptual-modeling profile.

  • Guizzardi, G. (2005). Ontological Foundations for Structural Conceptual Models. PhD thesis, University of Twente.
  • Guizzardi, G., Benevides, A. B., Fonseca, C. M., Almeida, J. P. A., Sales, T. P., & Porello, D. (2021). UFO: Unified Foundational Ontology. Applied Ontology, 17(1), 167–210. inf.ufes.br
  • OntoUML. OntoUML specification documentation. Read the Docs. ontouml.readthedocs.io
  • Guizzardi, G., et al. Types and Taxonomic Structures in Conceptual Modeling: A Novel Ontological Theory and Engineering Support. inf.ufes.br
  • NEMO, UFES. NEMO (Ontology & Conceptual Modeling Research Group). Federal University of Espírito Santo.

Foundational/Upper Ontologies: BFO, DOLCE, and SUMO

Barry Smith, Nicola Guarino, Claudio Masolo, Ian Niles, Adam Pease · 2000–present · maintained by ISTC-CNR Laboratory for Applied Ontology (DOLCE); Articulate Software (SUMO)

A comparison of three leading top-level ontologies: realist BFO, descriptive DOLCE and broad-coverage SUMO.

  • ISO/IEC (2021). ISO/IEC 21838-2:2021, Information technology — Top-level ontologies (TLO) — Part 2: Basic Formal Ontology (BFO).
  • BFO Ontology. BFO-2020 repository (ISO 21838-2 artifacts). GitHub. github.com
  • Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR. DOLCE homepage. ISTC-CNR.
  • Borgo, S., Ferrario, R., Gangemi, A., Guarino, N., Masolo, C., Porello, D., Sanfilippo, E. M., & Vieu, L. (2022). DOLCE: A Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering. Applied Ontology, 17(1), 45–69. arxiv.org
  • Niles, I., & Pease, A. (2001). Towards a Standard Upper Ontology. Proceedings of FOIS-2001. researchgate.net
  • Articulate Software. SUMO / Sigma knowledge engineering environment.

Object-Role Modeling (ORM/ORM2)

Terry Halpin · 1980s–present

A fact-oriented conceptual modeling approach with a precise constraint vocabulary and natural-language verbalization.

  • Halpin, T. Object-Role Modeling: An Overview (white paper). orm.net
  • Halpin, T. (2005). ORM 2 Graphical Notation (Technical Report ORM2-01). orm.net
  • Halpin, T., & Morgan, T. (2008). Information Modeling and Relational Databases, 2nd ed. Morgan Kaufmann.
  • Halpin, T. Object-Role Modeling Fundamentals: A Practical Guide to Data Modeling with ORM. Technics Publications. technicspub.com
  • Halpin, T. orm.net (ORM resource site).

Ontology Design Patterns

Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti · mid-2000s–present

A practice of cataloging reusable, named ontology-modeling solutions, with the eXtreme Design pattern-based development methodology.

  • Gangemi, A., & Presutti, V. (2009). Ontology Design Patterns. Handbook on Ontologies, 2nd ed., Springer. researchgate.net
  • Presutti, V., Daga, E., Gangemi, A., & Blomqvist, E. (2009). eXtreme Design with Content Ontology Design Patterns. Workshop on Ontology Patterns (WOP 2009), CEUR-WS Vol. 516. dl.acm.org
  • Gangemi, A. (2005). Ontology Design Patterns for Semantic Web Content. ISWC 2005. semanticscholar.org
  • Hitzler, P., Gangemi, A., Janowicz, K., Krisnadhi, A., & Presutti, V. (eds.). Ontology Engineering with Ontology Design Patterns: Foundations and Applications. IOS Press. ebooks.iospress.nl
  • Blomqvist, E., et al. Ontology Patterns: Clarifying Concepts and Terminology. CEUR-WS Vol. 1188. ceur-ws.org
  • Ontology Design Patterns community. Ontology Design Patterns portal.

9 Authority, norms and formal governance

The formal grounding of obligation, rights, delegation and the rules for changing rules. 6 frameworks

Deontic Logic & Normative Systems

Georg Henrik von Wright, Roderick Chisholm · 1951 (von Wright) – present

Modal logic of obligation, permission and prohibition, including contrary-to-duty structures and norm-conflict resolution.

  • von Wright, G.H. (1951). Deontic Logic. Mind, 60(237).
  • Chisholm, R.M. (1963). Contrary-to-Duty Imperatives and Deontic Logic. Analysis, 24(2).

Speech-Act Theory & Commitment-Based Interaction

J.L. Austin, John Searle, Terry Winograd, Fernando Flores · 1962 (Austin) – 1986 (Winograd & Flores) – present

Theory that utterances perform actions, extended into a request/promise/perform/declare cycle for organizational coordination.

  • Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Searle, J.R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press.
  • Searle, J.R. (1975). A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts. Language, Mind, and Knowledge (reprinted 1976).
  • Winograd, T. & Flores, F. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Ablex.
  • Winograd, T. A Language/Action Perspective on the Design of Cooperative Work. Stanford HCI Group. hci.stanford.edu
  • Medina-Mora, R., Winograd, T., et al. (1992). The Action Workflow Approach to Workflow Management Technology. Proceedings of CSCW 1992. lri.fr

Hohfeldian Analysis of Rights

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld · 1913–1917 (Hohfeld) – present

Eight-part scheme of correlative and opposite legal incidents that disambiguates what a right or authority actually confers.

  • Hohfeld, W.N. (1913). Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning. Yale Law Journal, 23(1).
  • Hohfeld, W.N. (1917). Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning: II. Yale Law Journal, 26(8).
  • Hohfeld, W.N. (1919/1923). Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays (ed. W.W. Cook). Yale University Press.

Constitutional Design & Governance

H.L.A. Hart, James M. Buchanan · 1961 (Hart) / 1986 Nobel (Buchanan) – present

Theory of rules about making and changing rules, from Hart's primary and secondary rules to Buchanan's constitutional economics and corporate charters.

  • Hart, H.L.A. (1961). The Concept of Law (2nd ed. 1994). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Buchanan, J.M. (1986). Prize Lecture: The Constitution of Economic Policy. Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 1986. nobelprize.org
  • Buchanan, J.M. & Tullock, G. (1962). The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. University of Michigan Press.

Delegation and Authority Theory (Academic)

Pope Pius XI, Moravcsik · 1931 (subsidiarity) – 1990s (principal-agent delegation chains) – present

Subsidiarity as a placement test for authority, plus principal-agent analysis of delegation chains and the delegation-accountability relationship.

  • European Union (2007). Treaty on European Union, Article 5 (Principle of Subsidiarity), as amended by the Treaty of Lisbon.
  • Pope Pius XI (1931). Quadragesimo Anno. Catholic social teaching encyclical.
  • Moravcsik, A. (1993). Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach. Journal of Common Market Studies, 31(4).

Norm Emergence and Evolution

David Lewis · 1969 (Lewis) – 2000s–present (MAS)

Convention theory and multi-agent simulation models of how norms arise, spread and are enforced without central design.

  • Lewis, D.K. (1969). Convention: A Philosophical Study (reissued Blackwell, 2002). Harvard University Press.
  • Savarimuthu, B.T.R. & Cranefield, S. (2011). Norm creation, spreading and emergence: A survey of simulation models of norms in multi-agent systems. Multiagent and Grid Systems, 7(1). journals.sagepub.com
  • Mahmoud, S. et al. (2020). Norm emergence in multiagent systems: a viewpoint paper. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 34(1). link.springer.com

What makes a specification runnable
The systems disciplines a machine needs to instantiate and operate an organization: requirements, execution, history, knowledge, realization, adaptation, economics and authorization.

10 Requirements and behavioral contracts

Stating what is required without saying how, and refinement as the test of whether a mechanism satisfies it. 8 frameworks

Zave & Jackson Reference Model (W, S, R)

Pamela Zave, Michael Jackson, Carl A. Gunter, Elsa L. Gunter · 1997-2001

Requirements-engineering model separating world assumptions, requirements and specification, with satisfaction defined as the entailment S, W ⊢ R.

  • Zave, P. & Jackson, M. (1997). Four Dark Corners of Requirements Engineering. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(1). doi:10.1145/237432.237434
  • Gunter, C.A., Gunter, E.L., Jackson, M. & Zave, P. (2000). A Reference Model for Requirements and Specifications. IEEE Software, 17(3). egunter.cs.illinois.edu
  • Jackson, M. (2001). Problem Frames: Analysing and Structuring Software Development Problems. Addison-Wesley.

KAOS Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering

Anne Dardenne, Axel van Lamsweerde, Stephen Fickas · 1993-2009

Goal-oriented requirements method with achieve/maintain/avoid/cease modalities, AND/OR refinement, obstacle analysis and agent responsibility assignment.

i* and Tropos

Eric Yu, Paolo Bresciani, Anna Perini, Paolo Giorgini, Fausto Giunchiglia, John Mylopoulos · 1997-2004

Actor and dependency modeling of intentional social relationships with softgoal satisficing, extended by Tropos into an agent-oriented development methodology.

  • Yu, E. (1997). Towards Modelling and Reasoning Support for Early-Phase Requirements Engineering. Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE'97). doi:10.1109/ISRE.1997.566873
  • Yu, E. (1995). Modelling Strategic Relationships for Process Reengineering. PhD thesis, University of Toronto. details unverified
  • Bresciani, P., Perini, A., Giorgini, P., Giunchiglia, F. & Mylopoulos, J. (2004). Tropos: An Agent-Oriented Software Development Methodology. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 8(3). doi:10.1023/B:AGNT.0000018806.20944.ef
  • The i* Wiki community. The i* Wiki (notation reference and community resource).

Design by Contract

Bertrand Meyer, Barbara Liskov, Jeannette Wing · 1992-1994

Software-correctness discipline stating caller and callee obligations as preconditions, postconditions and invariants, with Liskov-Wing behavioral subtyping.

  • Meyer, B. (1992). Applying 'Design by Contract'. IEEE Computer, 25(10). doi:10.1109/2.161279
  • Meyer, B. (1997). Object-Oriented Software Construction (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall.
  • Liskov, B.H. & Wing, J.M. (1994). A Behavioral Notion of Subtyping. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 16(6). doi:10.1145/197320.197383
  • ECMA International. ECMA-367: Eiffel: Analysis, Design and Programming Language. ecma-international.org details unverified

Assume-Guarantee (A/G) Contracts

Martín Abadi, Leslie Lamport, Jayadev Misra, K. Mani Chandy, Albert Benveniste, Benoît Caillaud, Dejan Nickovic, Roberto Passerone, Jean-Baptiste Raclet, Philipp Reinkemeier, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Werner Damm, Thomas A. Henzinger, Kim G. Larsen · 1981-2018

Formalism-agnostic algebra of (assumption, guarantee) component contracts with refinement, composition, conjunction and quotient.

  • Benveniste, A., Caillaud, B., Nickovic, D., Passerone, R., Raclet, J.-B., Reinkemeier, P., Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, A., Damm, W., Henzinger, T.A. & Larsen, K.G. (2018). Contracts for System Design. Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation, 12(2–3). doi:10.1561/1000000053
  • Abadi, M. & Lamport, L. (1993). Composing Specifications. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 15(1). doi:10.1145/151646.151649
  • Misra, J. & Chandy, K.M. (1981). Proofs of Networks of Processes. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-7(4). doi:10.1109/TSE.1981.230844

Refinement Calculus and Event-B

Ralph-Johan Back, Joakim von Wright, Carroll Morgan, Jean-Raymond Abrial · 1990-2010

Correctness-preserving stepwise derivation of programs and models from specifications, with Event-B's context, machine, invariant and event structure.

  • Morgan, C. (1994). Programming from Specifications (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall International.
  • Back, R.-J. & von Wright, J. (1998). Refinement Calculus: A Systematic Introduction. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-1674-2
  • Abrial, J.-R. (1996). The B-Book: Assigning Programs to Meanings. Cambridge University Press.
  • Abrial, J.-R. (2010). Modeling in Event-B: System and Software Engineering. Cambridge University Press.
  • Dijkstra, E.W. (1976). A Discipline of Programming.
  • Rodin Platform. Rodin Platform (open-source Event-B toolset).

TLA+ and Alloy

Leslie Lamport, Daniel Jackson · 1994-2012

Two lightweight formal-methods languages: TLA+ for temporal properties of behaviors and Alloy for bounded relational structure checking.

  • Lamport, L. (1994). The Temporal Logic of Actions. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 16(3). doi:10.1145/177492.177726
  • Lamport, L. (2002). Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers. Addison-Wesley. lamport.azurewebsites.net
  • Jackson, D. (2012). Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis (rev. ed.). MIT Press.
  • Newcombe, C., Rath, T., Zhang, F., Munteanu, B., Brooker, M. & Deardeuff, M. (2015). How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods. Communications of the ACM, 58(4). doi:10.1145/2699417
  • Informal Systems. Apalache: a symbolic model checker for TLA+. details unverified

Temporal Logics: LTL, LTLf, and Runtime Verification

Amir Pnueli, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Moshe Y. Vardi, Martin Leucker, Christian Schallhart, Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, Joseph Sifakis · 1977-2013

Temporal-logic semantics for always/eventually/until constraints, adapted to finite process traces (LTLf) and online monitoring with multi-valued verdicts.

  • Pnueli, A. (1977). The Temporal Logic of Programs. Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), IEEE. doi:10.1109/SFCS.1977.32
  • De Giacomo, G. & Vardi, M.Y. (2013). Linear Temporal Logic and Linear Dynamic Logic on Finite Traces. Proceedings of IJCAI 2013. ijcai.org
  • Leucker, M. & Schallhart, C. (2009). A Brief Account of Runtime Verification. Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming, 78(5). doi:10.1016/j.jlap.2008.08.004
  • Clarke, E.M. & Emerson, E.A. (1981). Design and Synthesis of Synchronization Skeletons Using Branching-Time Temporal Logic. Logics of Programs, LNCS 131, Springer. doi:10.1007/BFb0025774
  • Pesic, M. & van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2006). A Declarative Approach for Flexible Business Processes Management. Business Process Management Workshops (BPM 2006), Springer. details unverified

11 Workflow and process formalisms

Execution semantics for work, and the evidence that workflow need not be a primitive. 8 frameworks

Petri Nets & Workflow Nets

Carl Adam Petri, Wil van der Aalst · 1962 (Petri nets); 1998 (workflow nets)

Token, place and transition formalism for concurrent systems, specialized into workflow nets with a decidable soundness criterion and process mining.

  • Petri, C.A. (1962). Kommunikation mit Automaten. PhD dissertation, University of Bonn.
  • Petri, C.A. (1966). Communication with Automata (RADC-TR-65-377). Rome Air Development Center. details unverified
  • van der Aalst, W.M.P. (1998). The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management. The Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers, 8(1). doi:10.1142/S0218126698000043
  • van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2011). Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes (2nd ed. 2016). Springer.
  • van der Aalst, W.M.P., van Hee, K.M., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Sidorova, N., Verbeek, H.M.W., Voorhoeve, M., Wynn, M.T. (2011). Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis. Formal Aspects of Computing, 23(3).
  • IEEE Task Force on Process Mining (2011). Process Mining Manifesto. details unverified

Workflow Patterns

Wil van der Aalst, Arthur ter Hofstede, Bartek Kiepuszewski, Alistair Barros · 2003, extended through 2000s-2010s · maintained by Eindhoven University of Technology and Queensland University of Technology

Empirically mined, vendor-neutral catalog of control-flow patterns with companion data, resource and exception catalogs, used as an expressiveness benchmark.

  • van der Aalst, W.M.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Kiepuszewski, B., Barros, A.P. (2003). Workflow Patterns. Distributed and Parallel Databases, 14(1). doi:10.1023/A:1022883727209
  • Russell, N., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Edmond, D., van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2005). Workflow Resource Patterns: Identification, Representation and Tool Support. CAiSE 2005, LNCS 3520.
  • Russell, N., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Edmond, D., van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2004). Workflow Data Patterns. BPM/CAiSE technical reports and conference papers. details unverified
  • Russell, N., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Edmond, D., van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2006). Workflow Exception Patterns. BPM/CAiSE technical reports and conference papers. details unverified
  • Workflow Patterns Initiative. Workflow Patterns Initiative home and full bibliography.

BPMN, DMN & CMMN

Object Management Group (OMG) · BPMN 2.0 (2011); DMN 1.0-1.3 (2015-2021); CMMN 1.1 (2016)

OMG standards trio for imperative business process (BPMN), decision logic (DMN) and adaptive case management (CMMN).

  • OMG (2011). Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Version 2.0 (formal/2011-01-03). Object Management Group. omg.org
  • OMG (2013). Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Version 2.0.2. Object Management Group. omg.org
  • OMG (2015–2021). Decision Model and Notation (DMN), Versions 1.0–1.3. Object Management Group. omg.org details unverified
  • OMG (2016). Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN), Version 1.1. Object Management Group. omg.org

Declare & Declarative Process Models

Maja Pesic, Wil van der Aalst · 2006-2009, active research through 2020s

Constraint-based, LTL-grounded process language in which everything not forbidden is allowed.

  • Pesic, M., van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2006). A Declarative Approach for Flexible Business Processes Management. BPM 2006 Workshops, LNCS 4103. doi:10.1007/11837862_18
  • van der Aalst, W.M.P., Pesic, M., Schonenberg, H. (2009). Declarative workflows: Balancing between flexibility and support. Computer Science – Research and Development, 23(2).
  • Pesic, M. (2008). Constraint-Based Workflow Management Systems: Shifting Control to Users. PhD thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology.
  • Declare research and tooling. Declare research/tooling home.

DCR Graphs (Dynamic Condition Response Graphs)

Thomas Hildebrandt, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Exformatics · 2010, active industrial deployment through 2020s

Declarative event formalism built on condition, response, include, exclude and milestone relations, with distributed execution and industrial deployment.

  • Hildebrandt, T.T., Mukkamala, R.R. (2010/2011). Declarative Event-Based Workflow as Distributed Dynamic Condition Response Graphs. Proceedings PLACES 2010, EPTCS 69. doi:10.4204/EPTCS.69.5
  • Hildebrandt, T.T., Mukkamala, R.R., Slaats, T. (2013). Nested Dynamic Condition Response Graphs. FSEN 2011 (published 2012), LNCS 7141.
  • Mukkamala, R.R., Hildebrandt, T.T., Slaats, T. (2013). Exformatics Declarative Case Management Workflows as DCR Graphs. BPM 2013, LNCS 8094.
  • DCR Solutions. DCR Graphs / DCR Solutions project home and publication list. details unverified

Artifact-Centric Processes & Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM)

Anil Nigam, Noah Caswell, Richard Hull · 2003 (artifacts); 2010-2011 (GSM)

Process modeling around durable business records, with the sentry-gated Guard-Stage-Milestone lifecycle that became the basis of CMMN.

  • Nigam, A., Caswell, N.S. (2003). Business artifacts: An approach to operational specification. IBM Systems Journal, 42(3). doi:10.1147/sj.423.0428
  • Hull, R., Damaggio, E., Fournier, F., Gupta, M., Heath III, F.T., Hobson, S., Linehan, M., Maradugu, S., Nigam, A., Sukaviriya, P., Vaculín, R. (2010). A Formal Introduction to Business Artifacts with Guard-Stage-Milestone Lifecycles. WS-FM 2010 workshop. details unverified
  • Hull, R., Damaggio, E., De Masellis, R., Fournier, F., Gupta, M., Heath III, F.T., Hobson, S., Linehan, M., Maradugu, S., Nigam, A., Sukaviriya, P., Vaculín, R. (2011). Business Artifacts with Guard-Stage-Milestone Lifecycles: Managing Artifact Interactions with Conditions and Events. Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBS 2011). doi:10.1145/2002259.2002270

Sagas & Compensation

Hector Garcia-Molina, Kenneth Salem · 1987, re-popularized 2010s-2020s (microservices/durable execution)

Long-running transactions split into sub-transactions paired with compensating actions, now productized as durable execution.

  • Garcia-Molina, H., Salem, K. (1987). Sagas. Proceedings of the 1987 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. doi:10.1145/38713.38742

Commitment-Based Protocols

Munindar P. Singh, Paolo Yolum, Amit K. Chopra · 1999-2011, active research through 2020s

Interaction modeled as directed debtor-creditor commitments with a full lifecycle, from which process ordering is derived.

  • Singh, M.P. (1999). An Ontology for Commitments in Multiagent Systems: Semantics and Pragmatics. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 7(1). doi:10.1023/A:1008319631231
  • Yolum, P., Singh, M.P. (2002). Flexible Protocol Specification and Execution: Applying Event Calculus Planning Using Commitments. Proceedings of AAMAS 2002.
  • Chopra, A.K., Singh, M.P. (2009). Multiagent Commitment Alignment. Proceedings of AAMAS 2009. dl.acm.org
  • Singh, M.P. (2011). Information-Driven Interaction-Oriented Programming: BSPL, the Blindingly Simple Protocol Language. Proceedings of AAMAS 2011.
  • Winograd, T., Flores, F. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Ablex Publishing.

12 Provenance and persistence

History that lasts decades: what is canonical, what is derived, and what was believed when. 7 frameworks

W3C PROV (PROV-DM, PROV-O, PROV-CONSTRAINTS, PROV-N)

W3C Provenance Working Group, Luc Moreau, Paolo Missier · 2013 (W3C Recommendation); OPM lineage 2006-2011

W3C family of specifications for interchanging provenance as entities, activities and agents, with constraints and a successor lineage from the Open Provenance Model.

  • Moreau, L., Missier, P. (eds.) et al. (2013). PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model. W3C Recommendation. w3.org
  • Lebo, T., Sahoo, S., McGuinness, D. (eds.) et al. (2013). PROV-O: The PROV Ontology. W3C Recommendation. w3.org
  • Cheney, J., Missier, P., Moreau, L. et al. (2013). Constraints of the PROV Data Model. W3C Recommendation. w3.org
  • Moreau, L., Missier, P. et al. (2013). PROV-N: The Provenance Notation. W3C Recommendation. w3.org
  • Moreau, L., Clifford, B., Freire, J., Futrelle, J., Gil, Y., Groth, P., Kwasnikowska, N., Miles, S., Missier, P., Myers, J., Plale, B., Simmhan, Y., Stephan, E., Van den Bussche, J. (2011). The Open Provenance Model core specification (v1.1). Future Generation Computer Systems, 27(6). doi:10.1016/j.future.2010.07.005

Nanopublications

Paul Groth, Andrew Gibson, Jan Velterop, Tobias Kuhn · 2010-2016, actively maintained · maintained by nanopublications community (nanopub.org)

Minimal, independently citable assertions bundled with their own provenance and publication metadata, identified by content-hash trusty URIs.

  • Groth, P., Gibson, A., Velterop, J. (2010). The anatomy of a nanopublication. Information Services and Use, 30(1–2). doi:10.3233/ISU-2010-0613
  • Kuhn, T., Dumontier, M. (2014). Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts for Linked Data. Proceedings of ESWC 2014. arxiv.org
  • Kuhn, T., Chichester, C., Krauthammer, M., Queralt-Rosinach, N., Verborgh, R., Giannakopoulos, G., Ngonga Ngomo, A.-C., Viglianti, R., Dumontier, M. (2016). Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications. PeerJ Computer Science, 2:e78. peerj.com
  • Kuhn, T. et al. (2015). Making Digital Artifacts on the Web Verifiable and Reliable. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 27(9). doi:10.1109/TKDE.2015.2419657 details unverified

Event Sourcing, CQRS, and Immutability

Martin Fowler, Greg Young, Pat Helland, Jay Kreps · 2005-2015, industry-standard practice ongoing

Architectural pattern deriving all state from an append-only log of immutable events, with separate read-model projections.

Bitemporal Data Modeling

Richard T. Snodgrass, Ilsoo Ahn, Christian S. Jensen, TSQL2 committee · 1985-2011, implementations ongoing

Database theory of tracking valid time and transaction time for every fact, standardized in part by SQL:2011.

  • Snodgrass, R., Ahn, I. (1985). A Taxonomy of Time in Databases. ACM SIGMOD Record, 14(3).
  • Jensen, C.S., Snodgrass, R.T. (1999). Temporal Data Management. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 11(1). www2.cs.arizona.edu
  • Snodgrass, R.T. (ed.) et al. (1995). The TSQL2 Temporal Query Language. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  • ISO/IEC (2011). ISO/IEC 9075:2011, Information technology — Database languages — SQL (SQL:2011), Part 2.
  • Kulkarni, K., Michels, J.-E. (2012). Temporal features in SQL:2011. ACM SIGMOD Record, 41(3).

Content Addressing and Merkle Structures

Ralph Merkle, Linus Torvalds, Juan Benet, Ben Laurie, Adam Langley, Emilia Kasper · 1987-2014, in continuous large-scale production use

Identifying data by cryptographic hash of its content, using Merkle trees and logs for tamper-evidence and independent verification.

  • Merkle, R.C. (1988). A Digital Signature Based on a Conventional Encryption Function. Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO '87, LNCS 293, Springer.
  • Benet, J. (2014). IPFS - Content Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System. arXiv:1407.3561. arxiv.org
  • Laurie, B., Langley, A., Kasper, E. (2013). Certificate Transparency (RFC 6962). IETF. rfc-editor.org
  • Torvalds, L. et al. Git Internals - Git Objects. git-scm.com. details unverified

OAIS and Digital Preservation Standards

CCSDS, Library of Congress (PREMIS), ISO · 2001-2016 core editions, actively maintained (latest OAIS edition 2025)

ISO digital-preservation reference model for keeping information independently understandable for a designated community, with PREMIS, ISO 15489 and ISO 15926.

  • CCSDS (2012). Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), CCSDS 650.0-M-2; ISO 14721:2012. CCSDS / ISO. iso.org details unverified
  • PREMIS Editorial Committee (2015). PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, Version 3.0. Library of Congress. loc.gov
  • ISO (2016). ISO 15489-1:2016, Information and documentation — Records management — Part 1: Concepts and principles. iso.org
  • ISO. ISO 15926, Industrial automation systems and integration — Integration of life-cycle data for process plants including oil and gas production facilities. iso.org

Schema and Ontology Evolution

John F. Roddick, Natalya F. Noy, Michel Klein, Apache Avro, Google (Protocol Buffers), W3C OWL Working Group · 1995-2004 foundational research; Avro/Protobuf/OWL 2 practice ongoing

Vocabulary and compatibility rules for changing schemas and ontologies without losing the ability to read or reason over older data.

  • Roddick, J.F. (1995). A survey of schema versioning issues for database systems. Information and Software Technology, 37(7). doi:10.1016/0950-5849(95)91494-K
  • Noy, N.F., Klein, M. (2004). Ontology Evolution: Not the Same as Schema Evolution. Knowledge and Information Systems, 6(4). doi:10.1007/s10115-003-0137-2
  • Confluent, Inc. Schema Evolution and Compatibility. Confluent Platform Documentation.
  • Google. Protocol Buffers Language Guide. protobuf.dev. protobuf.dev details unverified
  • W3C OWL Working Group (2012). OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Document Overview (2nd edition). W3C. w3.org

13 Knowledge, evidence and uncertainty

Claims with status and evidence, contradiction, the unknown, and time. 8 frameworks

Belnap's Four-Valued Logic (FDE / BL4)

Nuel D. Belnap Jr., J. Michael Dunn · 1976-1977

A paraconsistent logic with four truth values (true, false, both, neither) that lets a system combine reports from multiple, possibly conflicting or silent sources without collapsing into triviality.

  • Belnap, N. D. (1977). A Useful Four-Valued Logic. In J. M. Dunn & G. Epstein (eds.), Modern Uses of Multiple-Valued Logic, pp. 8–37. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. doi:10.1007/978-94-010-1161-7_2
  • Belnap, N. D. (1977). How a Computer Should Think. In G. Ryle (ed.), Contemporary Aspects of Philosophy, pp. 30–56. Oxford: Oriel Press.
  • Dunn, J. M. (1976). Intuitive Semantics for First-Degree Entailments and 'Coupled Trees'. Philosophical Studies, 29, 149–168.
  • Ginsberg, M. L. (1988). Multivalued Logics: A Uniform Approach to Reasoning in Artificial Intelligence. Computational Intelligence, 4(3), 265–316.
  • Fitting, M. (1991). Bilattices and the Semantics of Logic Programming. Journal of Logic Programming, 11(2), 91–116.
  • Omori, H., & Wansing, H. (2017). 40 years of FDE: An Introductory Overview. Studia Logica, 105(6), 1021–1049. details unverified

AGM Belief Revision Theory

Carlos E. Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, David Makinson · 1985

A formal theory of rational belief change giving postulates and representation theorems for expansion, contraction and revision of a belief set or base.

  • Alchourrón, C. E., Gärdenfors, P., & Makinson, D. (1985). On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Contraction and Revision Functions. The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 50(2), 510–530. doi:10.2307/2274239
  • Gärdenfors, P. (1988). Knowledge in Flux: Modeling the Dynamics of Epistemic States. MIT Press.
  • Gärdenfors, P., & Makinson, D. (1988). Revisions of Knowledge Systems Using Epistemic Entrenchment. Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge (TARK), pp. 83–95.
  • Darwiche, A., & Pearl, J. (1997). On the Logic of Iterated Belief Revision. Artificial Intelligence, 89(1–2), 1–29. doi:10.1016/S0004-3702(96)00038-0
  • Hansson, S. O. (1999). A Textbook of Belief Dynamics: Theory Change and Database Updating. Dordrecht: Kluwer. details unverified

Epistemic Logic and the Runs-and-Systems Model

Jaakko Hintikka, Ronald Fagin, Joseph Halpern, Yoram Moses, Moshe Vardi · 1962; 1995

Modal logics of knowledge and belief, with a runs-and-systems semantics that grounds what an agent knows at a time in its recorded local state.

  • Hintikka, J. (1962). Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  • Fagin, R., Halpern, J. Y., Moses, Y., & Vardi, M. Y. (1995). Reasoning About Knowledge. MIT Press. cs.rice.edu
  • Halpern, J. Y., & Moses, Y. (1990). Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment. Journal of the ACM, 37(3), 549–587.
  • Fagin, R., & Halpern, J. Y. (1988). Belief, Awareness, and Limited Reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 34(1), 39–76.
  • van Ditmarsch, H., van der Hoek, W., & Kooi, B. (2007). Dynamic Epistemic Logic. Dordrecht: Springer (Synthese Library vol. 337).

Dempster–Shafer Theory and Subjective Logic

Arthur Dempster, Glenn Shafer, Audun Jøsang · 1967-1976; 2016

Calculi of belief functions and graded opinions that make the amount of genuine ignorance an explicit, quantified part of a claim's status and support trust propagation.

  • Dempster, A. P. (1967). Upper and Lower Probabilities Induced by a Multivalued Mapping. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 38(2), 325–339. doi:10.1214/aoms/1177698950
  • Shafer, G. (1976). A Mathematical Theory of Evidence. Princeton University Press.
  • Zadeh, L. A. (1984). Review of A Mathematical Theory of Evidence. AI Magazine, 5(3), 81–83. doi:10.1609/aimag.v5i3.452 details unverified
  • Jøsang, A. (2016). Subjective Logic: A Formalism for Reasoning Under Uncertainty. Springer (Artificial Intelligence: Foundations, Theory, and Algorithms). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42337-1
  • Yager, R. R. (1987). On the Dempster-Shafer Framework and New Combination Rules. Information Sciences, 41(2), 93–137. details unverified

Argumentation Frameworks (Abstract, Structured, and Toulmin)

Phan Minh Dung, Sanjay Modgil, Henry Prakken, Stephen Toulmin · 1958; 1995; 2013

Attack-graph formalisms (Dung, ASPIC+) and a practical argument layout (Toulmin) that compute which claims are justified, rejected or undecided when claims conflict.

  • Dung, P. M. (1995). On the Acceptability of Arguments and Its Fundamental Role in Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Logic Programming and n-Person Games. Artificial Intelligence, 77(2), 321–357. doi:10.1016/0004-3702(94)00041-X
  • Modgil, S., & Prakken, H. (2013). A General Account of Argumentation with Preferences. Artificial Intelligence, 195, 361–397. doi:10.1016/j.artint.2012.10.008
  • Modgil, S., & Prakken, H. (2014). The ASPIC+ Framework for Structured Argumentation: A Tutorial. Argument & Computation, 5(1), 31–62.
  • Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge University Press.
  • Caminada, M., & Amgoud, L. (2007). On the Evaluation of Argumentation Formalisms. Artificial Intelligence, 171(5–6), 286–310. details unverified

Assurance Cases: GSN and OMG SACM

Tim Kelly, Object Management Group · 1998; 2013-present

Structured claim-argument-evidence notations (GSN) and an interchange metamodel (SACM) for arguing that a system satisfies a requirement in a stated context.

  • Kelly, T. P. (1998). Arguing Safety – A Systematic Approach to Managing Safety Cases. PhD thesis, University of York (Department of Computer Science).
  • Assurance Case Working Group, Safety-Critical Systems Club (2021). GSN Community Standard, Version 3 (Version 2 was January 2018). Safety-Critical Systems Club. scsc.uk
  • Object Management Group (2013). Structured Assurance Case Metamodel (SACM), versions 1.0–2.3. OMG. omg.org
  • Bloomfield, R., & Bishop, P. (2010). Safety and Assurance Cases: Past, Present and Possible Future – an Adelard Perspective. Advances in Systems Safety (Proc. Nineteenth Safety-Critical Systems Symposium), pp. 51–67. London: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-84996-086-1_4
  • Rushby, J. (2015). The Interpretation and Evaluation of Assurance Cases. Technical Report SRI-CSL-15-01, SRI International. csl.sri.com

Event Calculus and Interval-Based Temporal Reasoning

Robert Kowalski, Marek Sergot, James Allen, Raymond Reiter · 1969; 1983; 1986; 2001

Logic-based formalisms for events, time-varying facts and temporal intervals that compute what held at a time from a recorded narrative.

  • Kowalski, R., & Sergot, M. (1986). A Logic-Based Calculus of Events. New Generation Computing, 4(1), 67–95. doi:10.1007/BF03037383
  • Allen, J. F. (1983). Maintaining Knowledge about Temporal Intervals. Communications of the ACM, 26(11), 832–843. doi:10.1145/182.358434
  • McCarthy, J., & Hayes, P. J. (1969). Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence. Machine Intelligence, 4, 463–502.
  • Reiter, R. (2001). Knowledge in Action: Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems. MIT Press.
  • Artikis, A., Sergot, M., & Pitt, J. (2009). Specifying Norm-Governed Computational Societies. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 10(1), Article 1. doc.ic.ac.uk

Design Rationale: IBIS, gIBIS, DRL, QOC, and ADRs

Werner Kunz, Horst Rittel, Jeff Conklin, Jintae Lee, Allan MacLean, Michael Nygard · 1970-1991; 2011

A family of methods for recording the issues, options and arguments behind a design decision, from IBIS through to lightweight architecture decision records.

  • Kunz, W., & Rittel, H. W. J. (1970). Issues as Elements of Information Systems. Working Paper No. 131, Center for Planning and Development Research, University of California, Berkeley. magrawal.myweb.usf.edu
  • Conklin, J., & Begeman, M. L. (1988). gIBIS: A Hypertext Tool for Exploratory Policy Discussion. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 6(4), 303–331.
  • Lee, J. (1991). Extending the Potts and Bruns Model for Recording Design Rationale. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), IEEE, pp. 114–125.
  • MacLean, A., Young, R. M., Bellotti, V. M. E., & Moran, T. P. (1991). Questions, Options, and Criteria: Elements of Design Space Analysis. Human–Computer Interaction, 6(3–4), 201–250. doi:10.1207/s15327051hci0603&4_2
  • Nygard, M. (2011). Documenting Architecture Decisions. Cognitect blog.

14 Planning and service composition

Discovering, composing and selecting mechanisms that satisfy declared requirements. 8 frameworks

Classical Planning: STRIPS, PDDL, PDDL2.1, PDDL3

Richard Fikes, Nils Nilsson, Drew McDermott, Maria Fox, Derek Long, Alfonso Gerevini · 1971-2005

The state-transition planning formalism (STRIPS) and its standardized description language PDDL with extensions for time, resources, constraints and preferences.

  • Fikes, R. E., & Nilsson, N. J. (1971). STRIPS: A New Approach to the Application of Theorem Proving to Problem Solving. Artificial Intelligence, 2(3-4), 189–208. doi:10.1016/0004-3702(71)90010-5
  • McDermott, D., Ghallab, M., Howe, A., Knoblock, C., Ram, A., Veloso, M., Weld, D., & Wilkins, D. (1998). PDDL — The Planning Domain Definition Language. Technical Report CVC TR-98-003/DCS TR-1165, Yale Center for Computational Vision and Control. isi.edu
  • Fox, M., & Long, D. (2003). PDDL2.1: An Extension to PDDL for Expressing Temporal Planning Domains. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 20, 61–124. jair.org
  • Gerevini, A., & Long, D. (2005). Plan Constraints and Preferences in PDDL3. Technical Report R.T. 2005-08-47, University of Brescia. strathprints.strath.ac.uk
  • Gerevini, A., Haslum, P., Long, D., Saetti, A., & Dimopoulos, Y. (2009). Deterministic Planning in the Fifth International Planning Competition: PDDL3 and Experimental Evaluation of the Planners. Artificial Intelligence, 173(5-6), 619–668.

HTN Planning and Goal Reasoning

Kutluhan Erol, James Hendler, Dana Nau, Malik Ghallab, Paolo Traverso, David W. Aha · 1994-2018

Hierarchical task network planning, which decomposes abstract tasks via a method library, together with the acting/monitoring loop and goal-driven autonomy for revising goals.

  • Erol, K., Hendler, J., & Nau, D. S. (1994). HTN Planning: Complexity and Expressivity. Proceedings of AAAI-94, 1123–1128. cs.umd.edu
  • Erol, K., Hendler, J., & Nau, D. S. (1996). Complexity Results for HTN Planning. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 18(1), 69–93. doi:10.1007/BF02136175
  • Nau, D., Au, T.-C., Ilghami, O., Kuter, U., Murdock, J. W., Wu, D., & Yaman, F. (2003). SHOP2: An HTN Planning System. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 20, 379–404. jair.org
  • Ghallab, M., Nau, D., & Traverso, P. (2004). Automated Planning: Theory and Practice. Morgan Kaufmann.
  • Ghallab, M., Nau, D., & Traverso, P. (2016). Automated Planning and Acting. Cambridge University Press.
  • Aha, D. W. (2018). Goal Reasoning: Foundations, Emerging Applications, and Prospects. AI Magazine, 39(2), 3–24. doi:10.1609/aimag.v39i2.2800

Semantic Web Services: OWL-S and WSMO

David Martin, Dumitru Roman, Dieter Fensel, SRI International, DERI · 2004-2005

Two early-2000s frameworks for describing web services with machine-interpretable semantics so software can discover, match and invoke them.

  • Martin, D., et al. (2004). OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services. W3C Member Submission. w3.org
  • Roman, D., Keller, U., Lausen, H., de Bruijn, J., Lara, R., Stollberg, M., Polleres, A., Feier, C., Bussler, C., & Fensel, D. (2005). Web Service Modeling Ontology. Applied Ontology, 1(1), 77–106.
  • Roman, D., et al. (2005). Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). W3C Member Submission. w3.org
  • Paolucci, M., Kawamura, T., Payne, T. R., & Sycara, K. (2002). Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities. Proceedings of the First International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2002), LNCS 2342, 333–347. doi:10.1007/3-540-48005-6_26
  • Kopecký, J., Vitvar, T., Bournez, C., & Farrell, J. (2007). SAWSDL: Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema. W3C Recommendation. w3.org

QoS-Aware Service Composition

Liangzhao Zeng, Jinghai Rao, Xiaomeng Su, Marco Pistore, Paolo Traverso, Mohammad Alrifai, Thomas Risse · 2004-2009

Research on choosing among functionally equivalent candidate services to optimize end-to-end quality of service across a composed workflow.

  • Zeng, L., Benatallah, B., Ngu, A. H. H., Dumas, M., Kalagnanam, J., & Chang, H. (2004). QoS-Aware Middleware for Web Services Composition. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 30(5), 311–327. doi:10.1109/TSE.2004.11
  • Rao, J., & Su, X. (2005). A Survey of Automated Web Service Composition Methods. In Semantic Web Services and Web Process Composition, LNCS 3387, 43–54. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-30581-1_5
  • Pistore, M., Traverso, P., Bertoli, P., & Marconi, A. (2005). Automated Composition of Web Services by Planning in Asynchronous Domains. Proceedings of ICAPS 2005. cdn.aaai.org
  • Alrifai, M., & Risse, T. (2009). Combining Global Optimization with Local Selection for Efficient QoS-Aware Service Composition. Proceedings of WWW 2009, 881–890. doi:10.1145/1526709.1526828

SLA Frameworks: WS-Agreement, WSLA, SLAng

Open Grid Forum, Alain Andrieux, Alexander Keller, Heiko Ludwig, James Skene, Davide Lamanna, Wolfgang Emmerich · 2003-2007

Specification languages that make service-level agreements machine-readable, covering objectives, metrics, accountable parties and violation consequences.

  • Andrieux, A., Czajkowski, K., Dan, A., Keahey, K., Ludwig, H., Nakata, T., Pruyne, J., Rofrano, J., Tuecke, S., & Xu, M. (2007). Web Services Agreement Specification (WS-Agreement), GFD.107. Open Grid Forum. ogf.org
  • Keller, A., & Ludwig, H. (2003). The WSLA Framework: Specifying and Monitoring Service Level Agreements for Web Services. Journal of Network and Systems Management, 11(1), 57–81. doi:10.1023/A:1022445108617
  • Skene, J., Lamanna, D. D., & Emmerich, W. (2004). Precise Service Level Agreements. Proceedings of ICSE 2004, 179–188. discovery.ucl.ac.uk

Contract Net and Market-Based Allocation

Reid G. Smith, FIPA, Tuomas Sandholm, Michael Wellman · 1980-1993

Distributed-AI approaches that allocate tasks among autonomous agents through announcements and bids, combinatorial auctions and market-clearing prices.

  • Smith, R. G. (1980). The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-29(12), 1104–1113. reidgsmith.com
  • FIPA (2002). FIPA Contract Net Interaction Protocol Specification, SC00029. fipa.org
  • Sandholm, T. (1993). An Implementation of the Contract Net Protocol Based on Marginal Cost Calculations. Proceedings of AAAI-93, 256–262.
  • Sandholm, T. (2006). Optimal Winner Determination Algorithms. In P. Cramton, Y. Shoham, & R. Steinberg (Eds.), Combinatorial Auctions (Chapter 14). MIT Press.
  • Cramton, P., Shoham, Y., & Steinberg, R. (Eds.) (2006). Combinatorial Auctions. MIT Press.
  • Wellman, M. P. (1993). A Market-Oriented Programming Environment and Its Application to Distributed Multicommodity Flow Problems. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 1, 1–23. doi:10.1613/jair.1

TOSCA and Declarative Deployment

OASIS · 2013-2020s

An OASIS standard for describing cloud application topologies through typed node and relationship templates, requirements and capabilities, and lifecycle interfaces.

Promise Theory

Mark Burgess, Jan A. Bergstra · 1990s-2014

A model of cooperation among autonomous agents built on the voluntary, unilateral promise, with independent assessment of whether promises are kept.

15 Economics of information and metareasoning

How much to spend on search, information, experiment and verification. 8 frameworks

Value of Information / Decision Analysis (VoI, EVPI/EVSI, Influence Diagrams)

Ronald A. Howard, Howard Raiffa, Robert Schlaifer · 1961-1966; influence diagrams 1980s-2005

Decision-theoretic calculus for what information is worth, using expected value of perfect and sample information and influence diagrams to show what is known before each choice.

  • Howard, R. A. (1966). Information Value Theory. IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics, SSC-2(1), 22–26. doi:10.1109/TSSC.1966.300074
  • Raiffa, H., & Schlaifer, R. (1961). Applied Statistical Decision Theory. Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University.
  • Howard, R. A., & Matheson, J. E. (Eds.) (1984). The Principles and Applications of Decision Analysis (2 vols.). Menlo Park, CA: Strategic Decisions Group.
  • Howard, R. A., & Matheson, J. E. (2005). Influence Diagrams. Decision Analysis, 2(3), 127–143. doi:10.1287/deca.1050.0020
  • Howard, R. A. (1988). Decision Analysis: Practice and Promise. Management Science, 34(6), 679–695. doi:10.1287/mnsc.34.6.679 details unverified

Multi-Armed Bandits: Exploration/Exploitation (Gittins Index, UCB, Thompson Sampling)

John C. Gittins, Tze Leung Lai, Herbert Robbins, Peter Auer, William R. Thompson · 1933-2011

The theory of sequential allocation among options with learnable payoffs, with index and sampling policies that balance exploring and exploiting.

  • Gittins, J. C. (1979). Bandit Processes and Dynamic Allocation Indices. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 41(2), 148–177. doi:10.1111/j.2517-6161.1979.tb01068.x
  • Gittins, J. C. (1989). Multi-Armed Bandit Allocation Indices. Wiley (2nd ed. 2011, with Glazebrook & Weber).
  • Lai, T. L., & Robbins, H. (1985). Asymptotically Efficient Adaptive Allocation Rules. Advances in Applied Mathematics, 6(1), 4–22. doi:10.1016/0196-8858(85)90002-8
  • Auer, P., Cesa-Bianchi, N., & Fischer, P. (2002). Finite-time Analysis of the Multiarmed Bandit Problem. Machine Learning, 47, 235–256. doi:10.1023/A:1013689704352
  • Thompson, W. R. (1933). On the Likelihood that One Unknown Probability Exceeds Another in View of the Evidence of Two Samples. Biometrika, 25(3/4), 285–294. doi:10.2307/2332286
  • Chapelle, O., & Li, L. (2011). An Empirical Evaluation of Thompson Sampling. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 24. papers.nips.cc
  • Li, L., Chu, W., Langford, J., & Schapire, R. E. (2010). A Contextual-Bandit Approach to Personalized News Article Recommendation. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '10), 661–670. doi:10.1145/1772690.1772758
  • March, J. G. (1991). Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning. Organization Science, 2(1), 71–87. doi:10.1287/orsc.2.1.71

Real Options Theory

Stewart C. Myers, Avinash K. Dixit, Robert S. Pindyck, Lenos Trigeorgis · 1977-1996

Applies option-pricing logic to irreversible investment under uncertainty, valuing the flexibility to defer, stage, expand or abandon.

  • Myers, S. C. (1977). Determinants of Corporate Borrowing. Journal of Financial Economics, 5(2), 147–175. doi:10.1016/0304-405X(77)90015-0
  • Dixit, A. K., & Pindyck, R. S. (1994). Investment Under Uncertainty. Princeton University Press.
  • Trigeorgis, L. (1996). Real Options: Managerial Flexibility and Strategy in Resource Allocation. MIT Press.
  • Bezos, J. (1997). 1997 Letter to Shareholders. Amazon.com. ir.aboutamazon.com
  • Bezos, J. (2015). 2015 Letter to Shareholders. Amazon.com. ir.aboutamazon.com

Metareasoning and Bounded Optimality

Stuart Russell, Eric Wefald, Eric Horvitz, Shlomo Zilberstein, Herbert Simon · 1955-1996

How a resource-limited agent should decide how much and what computation to perform before acting, via value of computation, bounded optimality and anytime algorithms.

  • Russell, S., & Wefald, E. (1991). Principles of Metareasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 49(1–3), 361–395. doi:10.1016/0004-3702(91)90015-C
  • Russell, S., & Subramanian, D. (1995). Provably Bounded-Optimal Agents. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2, 575–609. doi:10.1613/jair.63
  • Horvitz, E. J. (1987). Reasoning About Beliefs and Actions Under Computational Resource Constraints. Proceedings of the Third Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-87), 429–447. arxiv.org
  • Horvitz, E. J. (1988). Reasoning Under Varying and Uncertain Resource Constraints. Proceedings of the Seventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-88), 111–116. details unverified
  • Zilberstein, S. (1996). Using Anytime Algorithms in Intelligent Systems. AI Magazine, 17(3), 73–83. doi:10.1609/aimag.v17i3.1232
  • Simon, H. A. (1955). A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 69(1), 99–118. doi:10.2307/1884852
  • Simon, H. A. (1956). Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment. Psychological Review, 63(2), 129–138. doi:10.1037/h0042769

Sequential Decision Processes: MDPs and POMDPs

Richard Bellman, Martin Puterman, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Michael Littman, Anthony Cassandra · 1957-1998

Formal theory of optimal sequential decisions under uncertainty, including partially observable settings where the agent maintains a belief state.

  • Bellman, R. (1957). Dynamic Programming. Princeton University Press.
  • Bellman, R. (1957). A Markovian Decision Process. Journal of Mathematics and Mechanics, 6(5), 679–684. jstor.org
  • Puterman, M. L. (1994). Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming. Wiley. doi:10.1002/9780470316887
  • Kaelbling, L. P., Littman, M. L., & Cassandra, A. R. (1998). Planning and Acting in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains. Artificial Intelligence, 101(1–2), 99–134. doi:10.1016/S0004-3702(98)00023-X
  • Sondik, E. J. (1978). The Optimal Control of Partially Observable Markov Processes over the Infinite Horizon: Discounted Costs. Operations Research, 26(2), 282–304. doi:10.1287/opre.26.2.282
  • Sutton, R. S., & Barto, A. G. (2018). Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2nd ed.). MIT Press. incompleteideas.net

Forecasting, Calibration, and Proper Scoring Rules

Glenn Brier, Tilmann Gneiting, Adrian Raftery, Philip Tetlock · 1950-2015

Methods for eliciting and scoring probabilistic predictions so forecasters are rewarded for honest, calibrated forecasts.

  • Brier, G. W. (1950). Verification of Forecasts Expressed in Terms of Probability. Monthly Weather Review, 78(1), 1–3. doi:10.1175/1520-0493(1950)078%3C0001:VOFEIT%3E2.0.CO
  • Gneiting, T., & Raftery, A. E. (2007). Strictly Proper Scoring Rules, Prediction, and Estimation. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 102(477), 359–378. doi:10.1198/016214506000001437
  • Tetlock, P. E. (2005). Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton University Press.
  • Tetlock, P. E., & Gardner, D. (2015). Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Crown.
  • Wolfers, J., & Zitzewitz, E. (2004). Prediction Markets. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18(2), 107–126. doi:10.1257/0895330041371321
  • Murphy, A. H. (1973). A New Vector Partition of the Probability Score. Journal of Applied Meteorology, 12(4), 595–600. doi:10.1175/1520-0450(1973)012%3C0595:ANVPOT%3E2.0.CO details unverified

Agency Costs of Monitoring and Verification

Michael Jensen, William Meckling, Bengt Holmström, Ronald Dye · 1976-1993

Organizational economics treating monitoring, bonding and verification as costly activities whose optimal level minimizes total agency cost.

  • Jensen, M. C., & Meckling, W. H. (1976). Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure. Journal of Financial Economics, 3(4), 305–360. doi:10.1016/0304-405X(76)90026-X
  • Holmström, B. (1979). Moral Hazard and Observability. Bell Journal of Economics, 10(1), 74–91. doi:10.2307/3003320
  • Milgrom, P., & Roberts, J. (1992). Economics, Organization and Management. Prentice Hall.
  • Dye, R. A. (1993). Auditing Standards, Legal Liability, and Auditor Wealth. Journal of Political Economy, 101(5), 887–914. doi:10.1086/261908

Attention Economics and Rational Inattention

Herbert Simon, Thomas Davenport, John Beck, Christopher Sims · 1971-2003

Treats attention as a scarce, costed resource, from Simon's organizational design view to Sims's channel-capacity model of rational inattention.

  • Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (pp. 37–72). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu
  • Davenport, T. H., & Beck, J. C. (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Harvard Business School Press.
  • Sims, C. A. (2003). Implications of Rational Inattention. Journal of Monetary Economics, 50(3), 665–690. doi:10.1016/S0304-3932(03)00029-1
  • Maćkowiak, B., & Wiederholt, M. (2009). Optimal Sticky Prices under Rational Inattention. American Economic Review, 99(3), 769–803. doi:10.1257/aer.99.3.769 details unverified

16 Autonomic and self-adaptive systems

Self-observation, desired versus observed state, and triggers for reconsideration. 7 frameworks

MAPE-K Autonomic Computing

Jeffrey O. Kephart, David M. Chess, IBM · 2001–2003

A reference architecture for self-managing systems built around a Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute loop over shared Knowledge, with a taxonomy of self-* properties.

  • Kephart, J. O., & Chess, D. M. (2003). The Vision of Autonomic Computing. IEEE Computer, 36(1), 41–50. doi:10.1109/MC.2003.1160055
  • IBM Corporation (2003–2006). An Architectural Blueprint for Autonomic Computing. IBM (whitepaper, multiple editions). details unverified
  • Salehie, M., & Tahvildari, L. (2009). Self-Adaptive Software: Landscape and Research Challenges. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, 4(2), Article 14. doi:10.1145/1516533.1516538
  • IBM Corporation. IBM Autonomic Computing initiative overview materials. IBM; archived copies at web.archive.org (ibm.com/autonomic). details unverified

Rainbow and Models@run.time

David Garlan, Shang-Wen Cheng, An-Cheng Huang, Bradley Schmerl, Peter Steenkiste, Gordon Blair, Nelly Bencomo, Robert B. France · 2004–2020

Two research strands on architecture-based self-adaptation: a reusable adaptation infrastructure working over an architectural model, and live causally connected models of a running system.

  • Garlan, D., Cheng, S.-W., Huang, A.-C., Schmerl, B., & Steenkiste, P. (2004). Rainbow: Architecture-Based Self-Adaptation with Reusable Infrastructure. IEEE Computer, 37(10), 46–54. doi:10.1109/MC.2004.175
  • Blair, G., Bencomo, N., & France, R. B. (2009). Models@run.time. IEEE Computer, 42(10), 22–27. doi:10.1109/MC.2009.326
  • Cheng, B. H. C., et al. (2009). Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: A Research Roadmap. Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems (LNCS 5525), Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-02161-9_1
  • de Lemos, R., et al. (2013). Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: A Second Research Roadmap. Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems II (LNCS 7475), Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-35813-5_1
  • Weyns, D. (2020). An Introduction to Self-Adaptive Systems: A Contemporary Software Engineering Perspective. Wiley-IEEE Press. introsas.cs.kuleuven.be

Desired-State Reconciliation

Mark Burgess, Brendan Burns, Brian Grant, David Oppenheimer, Eric Brewer, John Wilkes, HashiCorp, Alexis Richardson · 1993–2017

An operations pattern that compares a declared target state with observed state and repeatedly converges the system toward it, using idempotent actions.

Intent-Based Systems

A. Clemm, L. Ciavaglia, L. Z. Granville, J. Tantsura, IETF Network Management Research Group · 2022 · maintained by IETF/IRTF Network Management Research Group (NMRG)

The IETF/IRTF definition of intent-based networking, separating declarative outcome-oriented intent from policy and requiring continuous assurance and closed-loop remediation.

Levels of Automation and Mixed-Initiative Interaction

Thomas B. Sheridan, William L. Verplank, Raja Parasuraman, Christopher D. Wickens, Eric Horvitz · 1978–2000

Human-factors work that grades how control is shared between people and automation, per processing stage, and how initiative can shift dynamically.

  • Sheridan, T. B., & Verplank, W. L. (1978). Human and Computer Control of Undersea Teleoperators. MIT Man-Machine Systems Laboratory, Cambridge, MA. academia.edu
  • Parasuraman, R., Sheridan, T. B., & Wickens, C. D. (2000). A Model for Types and Levels of Human Interaction with Automation. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics — Part A, 30(3), 286–297. doi:10.1109/3468.844354
  • Horvitz, E. (1999). Principles of Mixed-Initiative User Interfaces. Proceedings of CHI '99, ACM, 159–166. erichorvitz.com

Systems Safety: STAMP, HRO, and Resilience Engineering

Charles Perrow, James Reason, Nancy Leveson, Karl Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe, Erik Hollnagel, David D. Woods · 1984–2011 · maintained by MIT Partnership for Systems Approaches to Safety and Security (for STPA)

Safety-science traditions that treat failure as a designed-for condition of complex systems, covering normal accidents, latent failures, control-theoretic hazard analysis, high-reliability practice and resilience.

  • Perrow, C. (1984). Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Basic Books (2nd ed. Princeton University Press, 1999).
  • Reason, J. (1990). The Contribution of Latent Human Failures to the Breakdown of Complex Systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 327(1241), 475–484. doi:10.1098/rstb.1990.0090
  • Reason, J. (1997). Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents. Ashgate.
  • Leveson, N. G. (2011). Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety. MIT Press. direct.mit.edu
  • Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2001). Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty. Jossey-Bass (2nd ed. 2007).
  • Hollnagel, E., Woods, D. D., & Leveson, N. (Eds.) (2006). Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts. Ashgate.

Viable System Model and Management Cybernetics

Stafford Beer, W. Ross Ashby, Roger C. Conant · 1956–1979 · maintained by Metaphorum network

The cybernetic control theory behind the Viable System Model: requisite variety, the good regulator theorem, audit and algedonic channels.

  • Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall. pespmc1.vub.ac.be
  • Conant, R. C., & Ashby, W. R. (1970). Every Good Regulator of a System Must Be a Model of That System. International Journal of Systems Science, 1(2), 89–97. doi:10.1080/00207727008920220
  • Beer, S. (1972). Brain of the Firm. Allen Lane (2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons, 1981).
  • Beer, S. (1979). The Heart of Enterprise. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Beer, S. (1959). Cybernetics and Management. English Universities Press.
  • Metaphorum network. Viable System Model overview. Metaphorum.

17 Distributed systems, identity and authorization

Time and order across providers, identity for non-human participants, authorization derived from authority. 8 frameworks

Time, Order, and the Limits of Consensus

Leslie Lamport, Colin Fidge, Friedemann Mattern, Michael J. Fischer, Nancy Lynch, Michael Paterson, Eric Brewer, Seth Gilbert, Diego Ongaro, John Ousterhout, Sandeep Kulkarni · 1978–2014

A lattice of foundational results on event ordering and agreement without a shared clock: happened-before, vector clocks, FLP, CAP, Paxos/Raft and hybrid logical clocks.

  • Lamport, L. (1978). Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. Communications of the ACM, 21(7), 558–565. doi:10.1145/359545.359563
  • Fidge, C.J. (1988). Timestamps in Message-Passing Systems That Preserve the Partial Ordering. Proceedings of the 11th Australian Computer Science Conference, 56–66.
  • Mattern, F. (1989). Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems. Parallel and Distributed Algorithms, 215–226.
  • Fischer, M.J., Lynch, N.A., Paterson, M.S. (1985). Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process. Journal of the ACM, 32(2), 374–382. doi:10.1145/3149.214121
  • Gilbert, S., Lynch, N. (2002). Brewer's Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services. ACM SIGACT News, 33(2), 51–59. doi:10.1145/564585.564601
  • Lamport, L. (1998). The Part-Time Parliament. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 16(2), 133–169. doi:10.1145/279227.279229
  • Ongaro, D., Ousterhout, J. (2014). In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm. 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 305–319. usenix.org
  • Kulkarni, S.S., Demirbas, M., Madappa, D., Avva, B., Leone, M. (2014). Logical Physical Clocks and Consistent Snapshots in Globally Distributed Databases. OPODIS 2014. cse.buffalo.edu

Beyond Distributed Transactions

Pat Helland, Martin Kleppmann · 2005–2017

Practitioner discipline for cross-boundary consistency without atomic transactions: entities, idempotent at-least-once messaging, tentative/confirm/cancel and activities.

  • Helland, P. (2007). Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion. 3rd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR); reprinted ACM Queue, 14(5), 2016. doi:10.1145/3012426.3025012
  • Helland, P. (2005). Data on the Outside versus Data on the Inside. 2nd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR).
  • Kleppmann, M. (2017). Designing Data-Intensive Applications. O'Reilly Media.
  • Garcia-Molina, H., Salem, K. (1987). Sagas. ACM SIGMOD Record, 16(3), 249–259. doi:10.1145/38713.38742

CRDTs and Eventual Consistency

Marc Shapiro, Nuno Preguiça, Carlos Baquero, Marek Zawirski, Martin Kleppmann, Alastair R. Beresford · 2011–present

Replicated data types whose independent, coordination-free updates are proven to converge, with extensions to JSON-like documents.

  • Shapiro, M., Preguiça, N., Baquero, C., Zawirski, M. (2011). Conflict-free Replicated Data Types. 13th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS 2011), LNCS 6976, Springer, 386–400. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-24550-3_29
  • Shapiro, M., Preguiça, N., Baquero, C., Zawirski, M. (2011). A Comprehensive Study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types. INRIA Research Report RR-7506. inria.hal.science
  • Kleppmann, M., Beresford, A.R. (2017). A Conflict-Free Replicated JSON Datatype. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 28(10), 2733–2746. doi:10.1109/TPDS.2017.2697382
  • Kleppmann, M. et al. Automerge project.

Object Capabilities and Token-Based Authorization

Jack Dennis, Earl Van Horn, Mark S. Miller, Arnar Birgisson, Fission/DAG House community, Digital Bazaar · 1966–2014

Authority carried by unforgeable, attenuable, delegable references or tokens instead of identity checks, from classic capabilities to Macaroons, UCAN and ZCAP-LD.

  • Dennis, J.B., Van Horn, E.C. (1966). Programming Semantics for Multiprogrammed Computations. Communications of the ACM, 9(3), 143–155. doi:10.1145/365230.365252
  • Miller, M.S. (2006). Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control. PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University. erights.org
  • Birgisson, A., Politz, J.G., Erlingsson, Ú., Taly, A., Vrable, M., Lentczner, M. (2014). Macaroons: Cookies with Contextual Caveats for Decentralized Authorization in the Cloud. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2014. research.google
  • UCAN Working Group. UCAN Specification. community specification. github.com details unverified
  • Digital Bazaar et al. Authorization Capabilities for Linked Data (ZCAP-LD). W3C Community Group Draft Report. w3c-ccg.github.io

RBAC, ABAC, and Policy Languages

Ravi Sandhu, NIST, Vincent Hu, OASIS, W3C, Amazon Web Services (Cedar authors), Torin Sandall · 1996–2024

The main access-control models and the languages that express them, from role-based and attribute-based control to XACML, ODRL, Cedar and Rego.

  • Sandhu, R.S., Coyne, E.J., Feinstein, H.L., Youman, C.E. (1996). Role-Based Access Control Models. IEEE Computer, 29(2), 38–47. csrc.nist.gov
  • Ferraiolo, Sandhu, Gavrila, Kuhn, Chandramouli (2001). Proposed NIST Standard for Role-Based Access Control. ACM TISSEC.
  • ANSI/INCITS (2004). ANSI INCITS 359-2004, Role Based Access Control.
  • Hu, V.C., Ferraiolo, D., Kuhn, R., et al. (2014). Guide to Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) Definition and Considerations, NIST Special Publication 800-162. NIST. nvlpubs.nist.gov
  • OASIS (2013). eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) Version 3.0. OASIS Standard. docs.oasis-open.org
  • W3C (2018). ODRL Information Model 2.2. W3C Recommendation. w3.org
  • W3C (2018). ODRL Vocabulary & Expression 2.2. W3C Recommendation.
  • Disselkoen, C., Eline, A., He, S., Hietala, K., Kastner, J., Mamat, A., McCutchen, M., Rungta, N., Torlak, E., Wells, A., et al. (2024). Cedar: A New Language for Expressive, Fast, Safe, and Analyzable Authorization. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 8(OOPSLA1). arxiv.org
  • Sandall, T. et al. Rego Policy Language / Open Policy Agent. CNCF project.

Relationship-Based Authorization and Zanzibar

Philip W.L. Fong, Ruoming Pang, Google, OpenFGA (Auth0/Okta), AuthZed (SpiceDB) · 2011–2019

Authorization expressed as a graph of relationship tuples with userset rewrites, from Fong's ReBAC model to Google's Zanzibar and its open-source descendants.

  • Fong, P.W.L. (2011). Relationship-Based Access Control: Protection Model and Policy Language. Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY 2011), 191–202. pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca
  • Pang, R., Caceres, R., Burrows, M., Chen, Z., Dave, P., Germer, N., Golynski, A., Graney, K., Kang, N., Kissner, L., Korn, J.L., Parmar, A., Richards, C.D., Wang, M. (2019). Zanzibar: Google's Consistent, Global Authorization System. 2019 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 19), 33–46. usenix.org
  • OpenFGA project. OpenFGA. CNCF sandbox.
  • AuthZed. SpiceDB.

Workload Identity: SPIFFE, SPIRE, and Non-Human Credentials

Scytale and related engineers (details unverified), CNCF, W3C · 2016–2025

Standards for cryptographically identifying software workloads and for portable signed claims about any subject, covering SPIFFE/SPIRE, Verifiable Credentials and DIDs.

  • SPIFFE project. SPIFFE Specification. CNCF. github.com
  • SPIRE project. SPIRE documentation. CNCF.
  • W3C (2019). Verifiable Credentials Data Model 1.0. W3C Recommendation. w3.org
  • W3C (2025). Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0. W3C Recommendation. w3.org
  • W3C (2022). Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0. W3C Recommendation. w3.org

Interface Contracts and Versioning

Tom Preston-Werner, Ian Robinson, REA Group, Google, Linux Foundation, Jon Postel, Hyrum Wright, Anthropic · 1980–2024

Practitioner conventions for changing an interface without breaking dependents: semantic versioning, consumer-driven contracts, schema compatibility rules, robustness-principle critiques, deprecation and MCP.

18 AI agents and LLM systems

What an autonomous participant is, how its outputs are treated, and how its authority is limited. 7 frameworks

Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) Architecture

Michael E. Bratman, Anand S. Rao, Michael P. Georgeff, Rafael H. Bordini, Jomi F. Hübner, Michael Wooldridge · 1987–1996

A cognitive architecture for rational agents built on beliefs, desires and committed intentions, with commitment strategies, plan libraries and executable languages such as AgentSpeak(L).

  • Bratman, M.E. (1987). Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Harvard University Press (reissued CSLI Publications, 1999).
  • Rao, A.S., & Georgeff, M.P. (1991). Modeling Rational Agents within a BDI-Architecture. Proceedings of KR'91, 473–484.
  • Rao, A.S., & Georgeff, M.P. (1995). BDI Agents: From Theory to Practice. Proceedings of ICMAS-95, San Francisco. details unverified
  • Georgeff, M.P., & Lansky, A.L. (1987). Reactive Reasoning and Planning. Proceedings of AAAI-87, 677–682. details unverified
  • Rao, A.S. (1996). AgentSpeak(L): BDI Agents Speak Out in a Logical Computable Language. Agents Breaking Away (MAAMAW'96), Springer LNAI 1038, 42–55. doi:10.1007/BFb0031845
  • Bordini, R.H., Hübner, J.F., & Wooldridge, M. (2007). Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason. Wiley. jason.sourceforge.net

Agent Communication Languages (KQML, FIPA ACL, and the Social-Semantics Critique)

Tim Finin, DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort, Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA), Munindar P. Singh · 1994–2002 · maintained by IEEE FIPA (IEEE Computer Society standards committee)

Standardized agent message languages built on speech acts, and Singh's critique replacing unverifiable mental-state semantics with public social commitments.

  • Finin, T., Fritzson, R., McKay, D., & McEntire, R. (1994). KQML as an Agent Communication Language. Proceedings of CIKM'94, 456–463. doi:10.1145/191246.191322
  • Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (2002). FIPA ACL Message Structure Specification (SC00061G). FIPA. fipa.org
  • Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (2002). FIPA Communicative Act Library Specification (SC00037J). FIPA. fipa.org
  • Singh, M.P. (1998). Agent Communication Languages: Rethinking the Principles. IEEE Computer, 31(12), 40–47. doi:10.1109/2.735849
  • Searle, J.R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press.

LLM Multi-Agent Frameworks

Qingyun Wu (AutoGen, Microsoft Research), Guohao Li (CAMEL), Sirui Hong (MetaGPT), Chen Qian (ChatDev), Joon Sung Park (generative agents), CrewAI Inc., LangChain Inc. · 2023–2024

Frameworks and papers that orchestrate several role-prompted LLM instances through conversation, structured handoffs or graphs.

  • Wu, Q., Bansal, G., Zhang, J., Wu, Y., Li, B., Zhu, E., Jiang, L., Zhang, X., Zhang, S., Liu, J., Awadallah, A.H., White, R.W., Burger, D., & Wang, C. (2023). AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation Framework. arXiv:2308.08155. arxiv.org
  • Li, G., Hammoud, H.A.A.K., Itani, H., Khizbullin, D., & Ghanem, B. (2023). CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society. NeurIPS 2023; arXiv:2303.17760. arxiv.org
  • Hong, S., Zhuge, M., Chen, J., Zheng, X., Cheng, Y., Zhang, C., Wang, J., Wang, Z., Yau, S.K.S., Lin, Z., Zhou, L., Ran, C., Xiao, L., Wu, C., & Schmidhuber, J. (2024). MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework. ICLR 2024; arXiv:2308.00352. arxiv.org
  • Qian, C., Liu, W., Liu, H., Chen, N., Dang, Y., Li, J., Yang, C., Chen, W., Su, Y., Cong, X., Xu, J., Li, D., Liu, Z., & Sun, M. (2023). ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development. arXiv:2307.07924. arxiv.org
  • Park, J.S., O'Brien, J., Cai, C.J., Morris, M.R., Liang, P., & Bernstein, M.S. (2023). Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior. ACM UIST 2023; arXiv:2304.03442. doi:10.1145/3586183.3606763
  • CrewAI. CrewAI (open source project).
  • LangChain. LangGraph.

Tool Use and Capability Protocols

Timo Schick (Toolformer, Meta AI), Shunyu Yao (ReAct), OpenAI (function calling), Anthropic (Model Context Protocol), OpenAPI Initiative, Google (A2A) · 2022–2025

Techniques and protocols for letting LLM agents call tools and for describing capabilities: ReAct, Toolformer, function calling, MCP, OpenAPI and agent-to-agent protocols.

  • Schick, T., Dwivedi-Yu, J., Dessì, R., Raileanu, R., Lomeli, M., Zettlemoyer, L., Cancedda, N., & Scialom, T. (2023). Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools. arXiv:2302.04761. arxiv.org
  • Yao, S., Zhao, J., Yu, D., Du, N., Shafran, I., Narasimhan, K., & Cao, Y. (2023). ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models. ICLR 2023; arXiv:2210.03629. arxiv.org
  • Anthropic (2024). Introducing the Model Context Protocol.
  • Model Context Protocol. Model Context Protocol specification. modelcontextprotocol.io
  • OpenAPI Initiative. OpenAPI Specification. openapis.org
  • Google (2025). Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol. details unverified

Agent Evaluation and Reliability

Sayash Kapoor, Arvind Narayanan, Saurav Kadavath, Carlos E. Jimenez, Shuyan Zhou, Grégoire Mialon · 2022–2024

Methodological work on judging agents: cost-aware reporting, realistic benchmarks, and calibration of model self-assessed confidence.

  • Kapoor, S., Stroebl, B., Siegel, Z.S., Nadgir, N., & Narayanan, A. (2024). AI Agents That Matter. arXiv:2407.01502. arxiv.org
  • Kadavath, S., Conerly, T., Askell, A., Henighan, T., Drain, D., Perez, E., Schiefer, N., Hatfield-Dodds, Z., et al. (2022). Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know. arXiv:2207.05221. arxiv.org
  • Jimenez, C.E., Yang, J., Wettig, A., Yao, S., Pei, K., Press, O., & Narasimhan, K. (2023). SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues? ICLR 2024; arXiv:2310.06770. arxiv.org
  • Zhou, S., Xu, F.F., Zhu, H., Zhou, X., Lo, R., Sridhar, A., Cheng, X., Ou, T., Bisk, Y., Fried, D., Alon, U., & Neubig, G. (2023). WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents. arXiv:2307.13854. arxiv.org
  • Mialon, G., Fourrier, C., Swift, C., Wolf, T., LeCun, Y., & Scialom, T. (2023). GAIA: A Benchmark for General AI Assistants. arXiv:2311.12983. arxiv.org

Human-AI Teaming and Oversight

Saleema Amershi, Gagan Bansal, Eric Horvitz, Daniel S. Weld, European Union · 2019–2024

Design guidance, empirical findings and binding regulation on how people and AI share work and how human oversight must operate.

  • Amershi, S., Weld, D., Vorvoreanu, M., Fourney, A., Nushi, B., Collisson, P., Suh, J., Iqbal, S., Bennett, P.N., Inkpen, K., Teevan, J., Kikin-Gil, R., & Horvitz, E. (2019). Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3290605.3300233
  • Bansal, G., Wu, T., Zhou, J., Fok, R., Nushi, B., Kamar, E., Ribeiro, M.T., & Weld, D. (2021). Does the Whole Exceed its Parts? The Effect of AI Explanations on Complementary Team Performance. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3411764.3445717
  • European Union (2024). Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), Article 14: Human Oversight. artificialintelligenceact.eu

Agent Safety and Authority Limits

Yuntao Bai (Constitutional AI, Anthropic), Jerome Saltzer, Michael Schroeder, Norm Hardy, Kai Greshake · 1975–2023

Approaches and attack patterns concerning what an AI agent may do: constitution-based training, least privilege, the confused deputy and indirect prompt injection.

  • Bai, Y., Kadavath, S., Kundu, S., Askell, A., Kernion, J., Jones, A., Chen, A., Goldie, A., et al. (2022). Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback. arXiv:2212.08073. arxiv.org
  • Greshake, K., Abdelnabi, S., Mishra, S., Endres, C., Holz, T., & Fritz, M. (2023). Not What You've Signed Up For: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection. Proceedings of the 16th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec'23); arXiv:2302.12173. doi:10.1145/3605764.3623985
  • Hardy, N. (1988). The Confused Deputy: (or why capabilities might have been invented). ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 22(4), 36–38. doi:10.1145/54289.871709
  • Saltzer, J.H., & Schroeder, M.D. (1975). The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. Proceedings of the IEEE, 63(9), 1278–1308. doi:10.1109/PROC.1975.9939

19 Institutional grammar and computable norms

Machine-readable norms with source, priority, validity, defeasibility and level. 7 frameworks

Institutional Grammar (ADICO / IG 2.0)

Sue E. S. Crawford, Elinor Ostrom, Christopher K. Frantz, Saba N. Siddiki · 1995–2022

A slot grammar for coding rules from text into attributes, deontic, aim, conditions and or-else, with IG 2.0 adding objects, nesting and a constitutive/regulative split.

  • Crawford, S. E. S., & Ostrom, E. (1995). A Grammar of Institutions. American Political Science Review, 89(3), 582–600. doi:10.2307/2082975
  • Frantz, C. K., & Siddiki, S. N. (2021). Institutional Grammar 2.0: A Specification for Encoding and Analyzing Institutional Design. Public Administration, 99(2), 222–247. doi:10.1111/padm.12719
  • Frantz, C. K., & Siddiki, S. N. (Eds.) (2022). Institutional Grammar: Foundations and Applications for Institutional Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-90417-7
  • Siddiki, S. (2022). The Institutional Grammar in Policy Process Research. Policy Studies Journal, 50(2). doi:10.1111/psj.12466
  • Frantz, C. K., & Siddiki, S. N. Institutional Grammar 2.0 Codebook (v1.4). newinstitutionalgrammar.org

Constitutive Rules and "Counts-As"

John R. Searle, Andrew J. I. Jones, Marek Sergot, Davide Grossi, John-Jules Meyer, Frank Dignum, Guido Boella, Leendert van der Torre · 1969–2010s

Searle's account of how brute facts become institutional facts via 'X counts as Y in C', and its modal-logic formalizations of institutionalized power.

  • Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press.
  • Searle, J. R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. Free Press.
  • Searle, J. R. (2010). Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford University Press.
  • Jones, A. J. I., & Sergot, M. (1996). A Formal Characterisation of Institutionalised Power. Logic Journal of the IGPL, 4(3), 427–443. doi:10.1093/jigpal/4.3.427
  • Grossi, D., Meyer, J.-J. Ch., & Dignum, F. (2006). Classificatory Aspects of Counts-As: An Analysis in Modal Logic. Journal of Logic and Computation. details unverified
  • Boella, G., & van der Torre, L. (2004–2006). Series on constitutive norms in normative multi-agent systems. details unverified

Defeasible Deontic Logic

Donald Nute, Guido Governatori, Antonino Rotolo, Grigoris Antoniou · 1994–2009

A tractable non-monotonic logic for overridable obligations, with strict, defeasible and defeater rules, superiority relations and contrary-to-duty reasoning.

  • Nute, D. (1994). Defeasible Logic. Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, Vol. 3, Oxford University Press.
  • Antoniou, G., Billington, D., Governatori, G., & Maher, M. J. (2001). Representation Results for Defeasible Logic. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 2(2), 255–287. doi:10.1145/371316.371517
  • Governatori, G., & Rotolo, A. (2006). Logic of Violations: A Gentzen System for Reasoning with Contrary-To-Duty Obligations. Australasian Journal of Logic, 4, 193–215.
  • Governatori, G., & Sadiq, S. (2009). The Journey to Business Process Compliance. Handbook of Research on Business Process Modeling, IGI Global, 426–454. details unverified

Executable Legislation (Sergot et al.) and Rules as Code

Marek J. Sergot, Fariba Sadri, Robert A. Kowalski, Denis Merigoux, Nicolas Chataing, Jonathan Protzenko, OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation · 1986–2021

The program of translating statutes into running code, from the British Nationality Act as a logic program to Catala and the OECD Rules as Code movement.

  • Sergot, M. J., Sadri, F., Kowalski, R. A., Kriwaczek, F., Hammond, P., & Cory, H. T. (1986). The British Nationality Act as a Logic Program. Communications of the ACM, 29(5), 370–386. doi:10.1145/5689.5920
  • Kowalski, R. A. Legislation as Logic Programs. doc.ic.ac.uk
  • Merigoux, D., Chataing, N., & Protzenko, J. (2021). Catala: A Programming Language for the Law. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 5(OOPSLA), Article 164. doi:10.1145/3473582
  • OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (2020). Cracking the Code: Rulemaking for Humans and Machines. OECD Publishing. oecd-opsi.org
  • Catala project. Catala language project.

Normative Multi-Agent Systems (NorMAS)

Guido Boella, Leendert van der Torre, Harko Verhagen, Alexander Artikis, Marek Sergot, Jeremy Pitt, Natasha Alechina, Mehdi Dastani, Brian Logan · 2006–2013

A field treating norms as explicit runtime objects with a lifecycle of creation, activation, violation and sanction, governing heterogeneous autonomous agents.

  • Boella, G., van der Torre, L., & Verhagen, H. (2006). Introduction to Normative Multiagent Systems. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 12(2–3), 71–79. doi:10.1007/s10588-006-9537-7
  • Andrighetto, G., Governatori, G., Noriega, P., & van der Torre, L. (Eds.) (2013). Normative Multi-Agent Systems. Dagstuhl Follow-Ups, Vol. 4, Schloss Dagstuhl. drops.dagstuhl.de details unverified
  • Artikis, A., Sergot, M., & Pitt, J. (2009). Specifying Norm-Governed Computational Societies. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 10(1), Article 1. doi:10.1145/1459010.1459011
  • Alechina, N., Dastani, M., & Logan, B. Norm monitoring and enforcement in multi-agent systems (series of papers on runtime norm monitoring). details unverified
  • Dagstuhl (2007). Dagstuhl Seminar 07122: Normative Multi-agent Systems. Schloss Dagstuhl.

Smart Contracts and DAOs

Nick Szabo, Vitalik Buterin, Aragon, Colony, DAOstack, Lawrence Lessig, Brian J. Robertson, Gerard Endenburg · 1997–2015

The lineage from Szabo's smart contracts through blockchain DAOs, with Lessig's code-is-law critique and human-process codifications such as Holacracy and Sociocracy as contrast.

  • Szabo, N. (1997). Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks. First Monday, 2(9). doi:10.5210/fm.v2i9.548
  • Buterin, V. (2014). Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform (whitepaper). ethereum.org
  • Wang, S., Ding, W., Li, J., Yuan, Y., Ouyang, L., & Wang, F.-Y. (2019). Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Concept, Model, and Applications. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. details unverified
  • Lessig, L. (1999). Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (rev. 2006 as Code: Version 2.0). Basic Books.
  • Robertson, B. J. (2015). Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World. Henry Holt & Company.
  • HolacracyOne. The Holacracy Constitution (v5.0). holacracy.org
  • Endenburg, G. (1970s–80s). Originating work on the sociocratic circle-organization method. details unverified

Next on the reading list

Areas the design work has surfaced but the curriculum does not yet cover in depth:

AreaWhat it would add
Incremental computationself-adjusting computation (Acar, Blelloch, Harper); Adapton (Hammer et al.); query-based incremental compilers (Salsa, rustc); build systems à la carte (Mokhov, Mitchell, Peyton Jones); incremental view maintenance and differential dataflow (McSherry et al.); FRP semantics (Elliott, Hudak). The engine's dependency-indexed projection already relies on this family.
Social choice and voting theoryArrow, Condorcet, quadratic voting: aggregation rules are a kernel concern.
Strategy and capability theoryTheory of Constraints (Goldratt), Dynamic Capabilities (Teece), the Resource-Based View (Barney).
Classical organization designMarschak and Radner's theory of teams, Galbraith's information-processing view, Thompson's interdependence types, Weber's bureaucracy, Barnard's acceptance theory of authority.
StandardsSBVR for verbalizable business rules, ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 architecture viewpoints, COBIT and ITIL.
Packages and knowledge publishingsemantic versioning, content-addressed package stores (Nix, Guix), reproducible builds, Wikidata's referencing model, the FAIR principles, and interface theories for component composition (Broy).

Deliberately out of scope: cryptography beyond content addressing and signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, storage engines, HCI beyond mixed-initiative, general software-testing research, and most program-synthesis and compiler literature.

Suggestions for the curriculum are welcome at Contact.