Modeling Interactions Using Social Integrity Constraints: A Resource Sharing Case Study

Computees are abstractions of the entities that populate global and open computing environments. The societies that they populate give an institutional meaning to their interactions and define the allowed interaction protocols. Social integrity constraints represent a powerful though simple formalism to express such protocols. Using social integrity constraints, it is possible to give a formal definition of concepts such as violation, fulfillment, and social expectation. This allows for the automatic verification of the social behaviour of computees. The aim of this paper is to show by a concrete example how the theoretical framework can be used in practical situations where computees can operate. The example that we choose is a resource exchange scenario.