Specification and Verification of Communication Constraints for Interoperable Transactions

The speci cation of communication behavior is fundamental in devel oping interoperable transactions In particular the temporal ordering of messages exchanged between di erent communicating agents must be declar atively speci ed and veri ed in order to guarantee consistency of data in the various component systems This paper shows that by expressing communi cation constraints in propositional temporal logic the tableau method can be applied to construct a dependency graph If the speci cation is correct this method guarantees that all possible execution paths satisfying the spec i cation will be generated The declarative speci cation and veri cation of communication constraints in interoperable transactions is demonstrated us ing the classic business trip It is argued that the speci cation formalism provides an improvement over the Flexible Transaction Model