Organizational rules are considered as responsibilities of the organization as a whole. Accordingly, it is possible to distinguish between safety and liveness organizational rules. The former refer to the invariants that must be respected by the organization for it to work coherently, and the latter express the dynamics of the organization (i.e., how the execution must evolve).

Liveness rules define how the dynamics of the organization should evolve over time. These can include, for example, the fact that a role can played by an entity only after it has played a given previous role, or that a given protocol may execute only after some other protocol. In addition, liveness organizational rules can relate to other liveness expressions belonging to different roles, that is, relating the way different roles can play specific activities.

Safety rules define time-independent global invariants for the organization that must be respected. These can include, for example, the fact that a given role must be played by only one entity during the organization’s lifetime or that two roles can never be played by the same entity. In addition, they can relate to other safety rules of different roles or to expressions of the environmental variables in different roles. See Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology (p. 349) for more information about this concept.