Modeling and Verifying Business Interactions via Commitments and Dialogue Actions

A variety of business interactions in open environments can be captured in terms of the creation and manipulation of commitments among the agents. These include B2B contracts as realized via Web Services and other technologies. Also, the interaction protocols are formulated in terms of the commitments to regulate agents’ behaviors. However, such protocols can benefit from a stronger treatment of flexible interactions via dialogue actions to capture a rich variety of real-life business scenarios. This paper addresses the challenges of modeling and verifying business interactions using commitments and actions on such commitments augmented with dialogue actions to reconcile conflicts and reason about the validity of such commitments. We also introduce an interaction protocol taken from e-business domain to demonstrate the specification of a new formal protocol for agent negotiation. Finally, we use the MCMAS symbolic model checker to automatically verify this protocol against some given properties. We present the implementation and experimental results of this protocol and its verification.