A Procedure for an Event-Condition-Transaction Language

Event-Condition-Action languages are the commonly accepted paradigm to express and model the behavior of reactive systems. While numerous Event-Condition-Action languages have been proposed in the literature, differing e.g. on the expressivity of the language and on its operational behavior, existing Event-Condition-Action languages do not generally support the action component to be formulated as a transaction. In this paper, sustaining that it is important to execute transactions in reactive languages, we propose an Event-ConditionTransaction language, based on an extension of Transaction Logic. This extension, called Transaction Logic with Events (T R), combines reasoning about the execution of transactions with the ability to detect complex events. An important characteristic of T R is that it takes a choice function as a parameter of the theory, leaving open the behavioral decisions of the logic, and thereby allowing it to be suitable for a wide-spectrum of application scenarios like Semantic Web, multi-agent systems, databases, etc. We start by showing how T R can be used as an Event-Condition-Action language where actions are considered as transactions, and how to differently instantiate this choice function to achieve different operational behaviors. Then, based on a particular operational instantiation of the logic, we present a procedure that is sound and complete w.r.t. the semantics and that is able to execute T R programs.