Rolesdepends

Rolesdepends is a formal relation used in modeling organizational roles and their interdependencies in processes such as access control, workflow management, and policy specification. It expresses that the ability to perform or authorize a task by one role is contingent on the involvement or outcome of another role.

Semantics: The relation is typically defined as a binary relation D between roles, where D(a, b) indicates that role a depends on role b for completing its duties. In practice, dependencies are commonly represented as a directed acyclic graph to avoid circular prerequisites. Dependencies can be conditional, time-bound, or contingent on external events.

Applications: Rolesdepends supports enforcement of preconditions for task execution, audits of responsibility, and enforcement of separation of duties. It is used in access control policies, workflow engines, and compliance frameworks to model multi-step approvals and cross-role checks.

Examples: A financial approval process may model that an expense submitter role depends on an approver role, and the approver depends on a risk reviewer. In software release pipelines, the deployment role may depend on the build and test roles completing successfully.

Limitations and considerations: Managing rolesdepends requires careful governance to avoid deadlocks and excessive bottlenecks. Changes to one role may cascade through the dependency graph, so policy updates must be coordinated. It complements but does not replace existing models such as RBAC, ABAC, or SoD controls.