Specifying and applying commitment-based business patterns

Recent work in communications and business modeling emphasizes a commitment-based view of interaction. By abstracting away from implementation-level details, commitments can potentially enhance perspicuity during modeling and flexibility during enactment. We address the problem of creating commitment-based specifications that directly capture business requirements, yet apply in distributed settings. We encode important business patterns in terms of commitments and group them into methods to better capture business requirements. Our approach yields significant advantages over existing approaches: our patterns (1) respect agent autonomy; (2) capture business intuitions faithfully; and (3) can be enacted in real-life, distributed settings. We evaluate our contributions using the Extended Contract Net Protocol.