Role-based Architectural Modelling of Socio-Technical Systems

The focus of this paper is on how a role-based architectural approach can contribute to building normative models for evolvable and adaptable socio-technical systems, i.e. systems in which both software components and people play well-defined roles and need to interact to ensure that required global properties emerge. We propose a method that is associated with a set of new modelling primitives anchored on organisational roles and governed by social laws that handle the situations that may arise when the people involved deviate from prescribed behaviour and fail to play the role that they have been assigned as entities of the system.