Obligationoperate

Obligationoperate is a coined term used in discussions of deontic logic and normative systems to refer to an operator that models how obligations are produced or activated by system actions. As a concept, it sits at the intersection of obligation, action, and consequence, describing how performing an operation can give rise to new duties or requirements.

In formal treatments, obligationoperate can be represented as a binary relation or operator that takes a proposition p about a system state and an action a and yields a new obligation p′ that becomes obligatory following a. One common way to express this is: Obligationoperate(p, a) = the obligation that p holds after action a. Alternatively, as a dynamic operator, it maps a current set of duties D and an action a to an updated duty set D′ that includes the duties generated by a. This makes obligationoperate a dynamic extension of the standard obligation operator found in deontic logic (often written Oφ meaning "it is obligatory that φ").

Applications appear in modeling compliance requirements, governance rules, and workflow management, where actions within a process create new normative expectations. Example: in a software release workflow, the action a = "deploy to production" might yield the obligation q = "perform post-release monitoring." Then Obligationoperate(q, a) encodes that after deployment, monitoring is obligatory.

Because the term is not standardized, interpretations vary. Formal definitions depend on the underlying logic and the domain. See also deontic logic, dynamic deontic logic, obligation operator, and normative systems.