Commitment protocols are modularized specifications of interactions understood in terms of commitments. Purchase is a classic example of a protocol. Although a typical protocol would capture the essence of the interactions desired, in practice, it should be adapted depending on the circumstances or context and the agents' preferences based on that context. For example, when applying purchase in different contexts, it may help to allow sending reminders for payments or returning goods to obtain a refund. We contextualize a protocol by adapting it via different transformations.Our contributions are the following: (1) a protocol is transformed by composing its specification with a transformer specification;(2) contextualization is characterized operationally by relating the original and transformed protocols; and (3) contextualization is related to protocol compliance.
Abstract. Service-oriented applications facilitate the exchange of business services among autonomous and heterogeneous participants. Traditional system modeling approaches either apply at a lower of abstraction than required for such applications or do not accommodate the autonomous and heterogeneous nature of the participants. We present a business-level conceptual model that addresses the above shortcomings. The model gives primacy to the participants in a service-oriented application. A key feature of the model is that it cleanly decouples the specification of an application's architecture from the specification of individual participants. We formalize the connection between the two-the reasoning that would help a participant decide if a specific application is suitable for his needs. We implement the reasoning in datalog and apply it to a case study involving car insurance. We also demonstrate the scalability of our approach.
Commitment protocols have been proposed as a basis for modeling and enacting interactions among agents, such as those needed to carry out business processes. A central idea is that protocols would be developed and shared via libraries, and refined and composed to produce protocols that serve specific needs. Success in this program, therefore, presupposes that individual protocols and their compositions can be formally verified with respect to the properties of interest. This paper outlines an approach for verifying the correctness of commitment protocols and their compositions that exploits the well-known software engineering technique of model checking.
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